Introduction to predictive

maintenance in manufacturing
Data Lake Storage Event Hubs IoT Hub IoT Edge Machine Learning

Predictive maintenance (PdM) anticipates maintenance needs to avoid costs associated

with unscheduled downtime. By connecting to devices and monitoring the data that the
devices produce, you can identify patterns that lead to potential problems or failures.
You can then use these insights to address issues before they happen. This ability to
predict when equipment or assets need maintenance allows you to optimize equipment
lifetime and minimize downtime.

PdM extracts insights from the data that's produced by the equipment on the shop
floor and then it acts on these insights. The idea of PdM goes back to the early 1990s.
PdM augments regularly scheduled preventive maintenance. Early on, the unavailability
of sensors to generate data, and a lack of computational resources to gather and
analyze data, made it difficult to implement PdM. Today, because of advances in the
Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, data analytics, and machine learning, PdM
can go mainstream.

PdM requires data from sensors that monitor the equipment, and other operational
data. The PdM system analyzes the data and stores the results. Humans act based on
the analysis.

After introducing some background in this article, we discuss how to implement the
various pieces of a PdM solution using a combination of on-premises data, Azure
Machine Learning, and machine learning models. PdM relies heavily on data to make
decisions, so we start by looking at data collection. The data must be collected and then
used to evaluate what's happening now, as well as used to build up better predictive
models in the future. Finally, we explain what an analysis solution looks like, including
the visualizing of analysis results in a reporting tool like Microsoft Power BI.

Maintenance strategies
Over the history of manufacturing, several maintenance strategies emerged:

Reactive maintenance fixes issues after they occur.

Preventive maintenance fixes issues before they occur by following a maintenance
schedule based on prior failure experience.
 PdM also fixes issues before they occur, but considers the actual utilization of the
equipment instead of working from a fixed schedule.
Of the three, PdM was the most difficult to achieve because of limitations on data
collection, processing, and visualization. Let's look at each of these strategies in more
detail.

Reactive maintenance
Reactive maintenance services the asset only when the asset fails. For example, the
motor of your 5-axis CNC machining center is serviced only when it stops working.
Reactive maintenance maximizes the lifetime of components. It also introduces, among
other issues, unknown amounts of downtime and unexpected collateral damage caused
by failing components.

Preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance services assets at pre-determined intervals. The interval for an
asset is typically based on the asset's known failure frequency, historical performance,
simulations, and statistical modeling. The advantage of preventive maintenance is that it
increases uptime, results in fewer failures, and lets maintenance be planned. The
downside in many cases is that the replaced component has some life left. This results
in over-maintenance and waste. On the flip side, parts can fail before the scheduled
maintenance. You probably know preventive maintenance well: after every set hours of
operation (or some other metric), you stop the machine, inspect it, and replace any
parts that are due to be replaced.

PdM
PdM uses models to predict when an asset is likely to have a component fail, so that
just-in-time maintenance can be scheduled. PdM improves on previous strategies by
maximizing both uptime and asset life. Since you service the equipment at times that
are close to the component maximum lifetimes, you spend less money replacing
working parts. The downside is that the just-in-time nature of PdM is more difficult to
execute since it requires a more responsive and flexible services organization. Back to
the motor of the 5-axis CNC machining center, with PdM you schedule its maintenance
at a convenient time that's close to the expected failure time of the motor.

Different ways PdM can be offered

A manufacturer can use PdM to monitor its own manufacturing operations. It can also
use it in ways that provide new business opportunities and revenue streams. For
example:
A manufacturer adds value for its customers by offering PdM services for its
products.
A manufacturer offers its products under a Product-as-a-Service model in which
customers subscribe to the product instead of purchasing it. Under this model, the
manufacturer wants to maximize product uptime, since the product doesn't
generate revenue when it doesn't work.
 A company provides PdM products and services for products manufactured by
other manufacturers.

Building a PdM solution

To build a PdM solution, we start with data. Ideally the data shows normal operation
and the state of the equipment before, during, and after failures. The data comes from
sensors, notes maintained by equipment operators, run information, environmental
data, machine specifications, and so on. Systems of record can include historians,
manufacturing execution systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and so on. The
data is made available for analytics in a variety of ways. The following diagram illustrates
The Team Data Science Process (TDSP). The process is customized for manufacturing
and does an excellent job of explaining the various concerns that one has when building
and executing machine learning models.

Your first task is to identify the types of failures you want to predict. With that in mind,
you then identify the data sources that have relevant data about that failure type. The
pipeline gets the data into the system from your environment. The data scientists use
their favorite machine learning tools to prepare the data. At this point, they're ready to
create and train models that can identify diverse types of issues. The models answer
questions like:

For the asset, what's the probability that a failure occurs within the next X hours?
Answer: 0-100%
What's the remaining useful life of the asset? Answer: X hours
Is this asset behaving in an unusual way? Answer: Yes or No
Which asset requires servicing most urgently? Answer: Asset X

Once developed, the models can run in:

The equipment itself for self-diagnostics.

An edge device in the manufacturing environment.
 Azure.

After deployment, you continue to build and maintain the PdM solution.
With Azure you can train and test the models on your technology of choice. You can use
GPUs, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), CPUs, large-memory machines, and so
on. Azure fully embraces the open-source tools that data scientists use, such as R and
Python. As the analysis completes, the results can be displayed in other facets of the
dashboard or in other reports. These reports can appear in custom tools or in reporting
tools like Power BI.

Whatever your PdM needs, Azure has the tools, the scale, and the capabilities to build a
solid solution.

Getting started
A lot of equipment found on the factory floor generates data. Start collecting it as soon
as possible. As failures occur, have the data scientists analyze the data to create models
to detect future failures. As knowledge builds about failure detection, move to
predictive mode where you fix components during planned downtime. The Predictive
Maintenance Modeling Guide provides a solid walkthrough of building the machine
learning pieces of the solution.

To see an example solution, review the solution, guide, and playbook for PdM in
Aerospace . If you need to learn about building models, we recommend visiting
Foundations of data science for machine learning. The Introduction to Azure Machine
Learning Learn module introduces you to Azure tools.

Components
Azure Blob Storage is scalable and secure object storage for unstructured data.
You can use it for archives, data lakes, high-performance computing, machine
learning, and cloud-native workloads.

Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed, highly responsive, scalable NoSQL

database for modern app development. It provides enterprise-grade security and
supports APIs for many databases, languages, and platforms. Examples include
SQL, MongoDB, Gremlin, Table, and Apache Cassandra. Serverless, automatic
scaling options in Azure Cosmos DB efficiently manage the capacity demands of
applications.
Azure Data Lake Storage is a massively scalable and secure storage service for
high-performance analytics workloads. The data typically comes from multiple
heterogeneous sources and can be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured.
Data Lake Storage Gen2 combines Data Lake Storage Gen1 capabilities with Blob
Storage, and provides file system semantics, file-level security, and scale. It also
offers the tiered storage, high availability, and disaster recovery capabilities of Blob
Storage.
Azure Event Hubs is a highly scalable data streaming platform and event
ingestion service, capable of receiving and processing millions of events per
second. Event Hubs can process and store events, data, or telemetry produced by
distributed software and devices. Data sent to an event hub can be transformed
and stored using any real-time analytics provider or batching and storage
adapters. Event Hubs provides publish-subscribe capabilities with low latency at
massive scale, which makes it appropriate for big data scenarios.
Azure IoT Edge deploys cloud workloads to run on edge devices via standard
containers. IoT Edge intelligent devices can respond quickly and offline, reducing
latency and bandwidth usage, and increasing reliability. They can also limit costs
by preprocessing and sending only necessary data to the cloud. Devices can run AI
and machine learning modules, Azure and third-party services, and custom
business logic.

Azure IoT Hub is a fully managed service that enables reliable and secure
bidirectional communications between millions of IoT devices and a cloud-based
back end. It provides per-device authentication, message routing, integration with
other Azure services, and management features to control and configure the
devices.

Azure Machine Learning is an enterprise-grade machine learning service for

building and deploying models quickly. It provides users at all skill levels with a
low-code designer, automated machine learning, and a hosted Jupyter notebook
environment that supports various IDEs.
Machine learning enables computers to learn from data and experiences and to
act without being explicitly programmed. Customers can build AI applications that
intelligently sense, process, and act on information, augmenting human
capabilities, increasing speed and efficiency, and helping organizations achieve
more.
Azure Service Bus is a fully managed enterprise message broker with message
queues and publish-subscribe topics. It's used to connect applications, services,
 and devices. Together with Azure Relay, Service Bus can connect to remotely
hosted applications and services.
Azure SQL is a family of SQL cloud databases that provides a unified experience
for your entire SQL portfolio, and a wide range of deployment options from edge
to cloud.

Azure SQL Database , part of the Azure SQL family, is a fully managed platform
as a service (PaaS) database engine. It always runs on the latest stable version of
the SQL Server database engine and patched OS. It handles most database
management functions for you, including upgrading, patching, backups, and
monitoring. It provides the broadest SQL Server engine compatibility, so you can
migrate your SQL Server databases without changing your apps.

Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that provides the capabilities to

create rich interactive data visualizations. It includes services, apps, and connectors
that can turn unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and
interactive insights. Power BI can connect to hundreds of data sources, simplify
data preparation, and support ad hoc analysis.

Azure Data Explorer is a fast and highly scalable data exploration service for log
and telemetry data. You can use Azure Data Explorer to develop a time series
service. Azure Data Explorer includes native support for creation, manipulation,
and analysis of multiple time series with near real-time monitoring solutions and
workflows.
Azure Data Explorer can ingest data from Azure IoT Hub , Azure Event Hubs ,
Azure Stream Analytics , Power Automate , Azure Logic Apps , Kafka, Apache
Spark, and many other services and platforms. Ingestion is scalable, and there are
no limits. Supported Azure Data Explorer ingestion formats include JSON, CSV,
Avro, Parquet, ORC, TXT, and other formats.
The Azure Data Explorer Web UI lets you run queries and build data visualization
dashboards. Azure Data Explorer also integrates with other dashboard services like
Power BI, Grafana, and other data visualization tools that use ODBC and JDBC
connectors. The optimized native Azure Data Explorer connector for Power BI
supports direct query or import mode, including query parameters and filters. For
more information, see Data visualization with Azure Data Explorer.

Conclusion
PdM improves on preventive maintenance schedules by identifying specific components
to inspect and repair or replace. It requires machines that are instrumented and
connected to provide data for building PdM solutions.

Microsoft's infrastructure can help you build solutions that run on the device, at the
edge, and in the cloud. There are many resources to help you get started.

To begin, pick out the top one to three failures that you want to prevent and begin your
discovery process with those items. Then, identify how to get the data that helps
identify the failures. Combine that data with the skills that you get from the Foundations
of data science for machine learning course to build your PdM models.

Contributors
This article is maintained by Microsoft. It was originally written by the following
contributors.

Principal author:

Scott Seely | Software Architect

Next steps
Introduction to Azure Blob Storage
Azure Cosmos DB documentation
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 documentation
Azure Event Hubs documentation
Azure IoT Edge documentation
Azure IoT Hub Documentation
Azure Machine Learning documentation
Azure Service Bus Messaging documentation
Azure Relay documentation
Azure SQL documentation
Power BI documentation
Time series analysis in Azure Data Explorer

Related resources
Predictive maintenance solution
Extract actionable insights from IoT data
Azure industrial IoT analytics guidance
Condition monitoring for industrial IoT
Connected factory hierarchy service
Connected factory signal pipeline
IoT Edge railroad maintenance and safety system
Quality assurance