(38c) Data Characterization, Visualization and Analytics for a Smart Manufacturing Testbed

The emergence of the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and ever advancing computing and communication technologies have fueled a new industrial revolution. This revolution is happening worldwide to make current manufacturing systems smarter, safer, and more efficient. Although many general frameworks have been proposed for IoT enabled systems and their potential in industrial applications, there is limited literature on demonstrations or testbeds of such systems. Simulation is a powerful tool but the fidelity of the simulated system is limited by the understanding on the system; that is, the model that describes the system. In this work, with industrial IoT still in its infancy, there is not sufficient understanding on the property, capacity and performance of IoT sensors to enable accurate simulation. In addition, there is a lack of systematic study on the characterization and representation of data generated by industrial IoT sensors and data analytics challenges associated with industrial IoT sensor data. These are the major motivations for us to build a smart manufacturing testbed equipped with IoT vibration sensors, and to investigate the capabilities of these IoT vibration sensors for process monitoring by building soft sensors to predict key process variables. We will discuss the details of the testbed setup; investigate the characteristics of the data collected from the IoT vibration sensors; and explore data representation and visualization. The results from soft sensor development and validation will be presented, and summaries and future directions will be provided. We expect that the findings from this work can be generalized and extended to actual manufacturing systems.