Predictive Maintenance Using GPU-Accelerated Partially Observable Markov Decision Process

Abstract

The Industrial IoT era has seen an outburst of areas benefiting from collecting more data. This includes Industry 4.0 and predictive maintenance, which have benefited from advancements in edge and fog computing. Predictive maintenance aims to minimize the downtime due to maintenance of machinery, while simultaneously minimizing the risk of unforeseen failures. This paper proposes a method to aid industries to make maintenance scheduling decisions that can be adopted in a distributed factory environment. The Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) approach is used to determine the optimal time for maintenance for a machine. We first put forward an offline method for learning the Markov model parameters using historical sensor data. To allow for continual learning, an algorithm based on particle filters is proposed to provide online estimation of parameters of a Partially Observable MDP model. The particle filter algorithm allows the framework to adapt uniquely to each machine. The relative benefits of the POMDP model over a standard MDP model in the presence of noisy sensor data are evaluated through simulations which show significant improvements in revenue and reduced downtime. The POMDP and particle filter computations are executed on GPU-accelerated edge devices which achieve a speed-up of around 4 times compared to the CPU implementation.