A Semantic Framework for Condition Monitoring in Industry 4.0 based on Evolving Knowledge Bases

Tracking #: 3402-4616

Authors: 
Franco Giustozzi
Julien Saunier
Cecilia Zanni-Merk

Responsible editor: 
Guest Editors SW for Industrial Engineering 2022

Submission type: 
Full Paper
Abstract: 
In Industry 4.0, factory assets and machines are equipped with sensors that collect data for effective condition monitoring. This is a difficult task since it requires the integration and processing of heterogeneous data from different sources, with different temporal resolutions and underlying meanings. Ontologies have emerged as a pertinent method to deal with data integration and to represent manufacturing knowledge in a machine-interpretable way through the construction of semantic models. Ontologies are used to structure knowledge in knowledge bases, which also contain instances and information about these data. Thus, a knowledge base provides a sort of virtual representation of the different elements involved in a manufacturing process. Moreover, the monitoring of industrial processes depends on the dynamic context of their execution. Under these circumstances, the semantic model must provide a way to represent this evolution in order to represent in which situation(s) a resource is in during the execution of its tasks to support decision making. This paper proposes a semantic framework to address the evolution of knowledge bases for condition monitoring in Industry 4.0. To this end, firstly we propose a semantic model (the COInd4 ontology) for the manufacturing domain that represents the resources and processes that are part of a factory, with special emphasis on the context of these resources and processes. Relevant situations that combine sensor observations with domain knowledge are also represented in the model. Secondly, an approach that uses stream reasoning to detect these situations that lead to potential failures is introduced. This approach enriches data collected from sensors with contextual information using the proposed semantic model. The use of stream reasoning facilitates the integration of data from different data sources, different temporal resolutions as well as the processing of these data in real time. This allows to derive high-level situations from lower-level context and sensor information. Detecting situations can trigger actions to adapt the process behavior, and in turn, this change in behavior can lead to the generation of new contexts leading to new situations. These situations can have different levels of severity, and can be nested in different ways. Dealing with the rich relations among situations requires an efficient approach to organize them. Therefore, we propose a method to build a lattice, ordering those situations depending on the constraints they rely on. This lattice represents a road-map of all the situations that can be reached from a given one, normal or abnormal. This helps in decision support, by allowing the identification of the actions that can be taken to correct the abnormality avoiding in this way the interruption of the manufacturing processes. Finally, an industrial application scenario for the proposed approach is described.
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Reviewed

Decision/Status: 
Minor Revision

Solicited Reviews:
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Review #1
By Melinda Hodkiewicz submitted on 21/Mar/2023
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

We thank the authors for their responses to our comments and the comment of the other reviewers. We are now happy with the submission.

Review #2
Anonymous submitted on 21/Apr/2023
Suggestion:
Minor Revision
Review Comment:

For the third time, I have reviewed this manuscript but changes asked for have once again not been implemented. Adding a description to the introduction does is not the change that was asked for. The term ontology evolution is not the correct term to be used and the authors are trying to push this term into the field of stream reasoning. However, the dynamics of the model as presented by this work is already encompassed by the field and does not need the addition of ontology evolution, especially since the ontological changes of addition/modification of concepts (Tbox) is not covered in this work.

I don't have any other problems with this work and would like to thank the authors for addressing the other issues. I would have gladly accepted the manuscript if not for the usage of the term ontology evolution in this context. However, the decisions lies with the editors.

As a side not, I had asked the authors to highlight changes in a different color in their manuscript for easier reviewing, which they did not do. When only providing page and line numbers of changes, make sure these are actually correct. The change to the introduction for the additional explanation on ontology evolution was not on page 2 lines 22-40 but later starting on line 47. In the future, it would be very much appreciated if the reviewing process would be as seamless as possible aided by the authors and not made more difficult.