An industrial big data pipeline for data-driven analytics maintenance applications in large-scale smart manufacturing facilities

The term smart manufacturing refers to a future-state of manufacturing, where the real-time transmission and analysis of data from across the factory creates manufacturing intelligence, which can be used to have a positive impact across all aspects of operations. In recent years, many initiatives and groups have been formed to advance smart manufacturing, with the most prominent being the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition (SMLC), Industry 4.0, and the Industrial Internet Consortium. These initiatives comprise industry, academic and government partners, and contribute to the development of strategic policies, guidelines, and roadmaps relating to smart manufacturing adoption. In turn, many of these recommendations may be implemented using data-centric technologies, such as Big Data, Machine Learning, Simulation, Internet of Things and Cyber Physical Systems, to realise smart operations in the factory. Given the importance of machine uptime and availability in smart manufacturing, this research centres on the application of data-driven analytics to industrial equipment maintenance. The main contributions of this research are a set of data and system requirements for implementing equipment maintenance applications in industrial environments, and an information system model that provides a scalable and fault tolerant big data pipeline for integrating, processing and analysing industrial equipment data. These contributions are considered in the context of highly regulated large-scale manufacturing environments, where legacy (e.g. automation controllers) and emerging instrumentation (e.g. internet-aware smart sensors) must be supported to facilitate initial smart manufacturing efforts.