Developing an AI-enabled IIoT platform -- Lessons learned from early use case validation

For a broader adoption of AI in industrial production, adequate infrastructure capabilities are crucial. This includes easing the integration of AI with industrial devices, support for distributed deployment, monitoring, and consistent system configuration. Existing IIoT platforms still lack required capabilities to flexibly integrate reusable AI services and relevant standards such as Asset Administration Shells or OPC UA in an open, ecosystem-based manner. This is exactly what our next level Intelligent Industrial Production Ecosphere (IIP-Ecosphere) platform addresses, employing a highly configurable low-code based approach. In this paper, we introduce the design of this platform and discuss an early evaluation in terms of a demonstrator for AI-enabled visual quality inspection. This is complemented by insights and lessons learned during this early evaluation activity.

Identifying Cause-and-Effect Relationships of Manufacturing Errors using Sequence-to-Sequence Learning

In car-body production the pre-formed sheet metal parts of the body are assembled on fully-automated production lines. The body passes through multiple stations in succession, and is processed according to the order requirements. The timely completion of orders depends on the individual station-based operations concluding within their scheduled cycle times. If an error occurs in one station, it can have a knock-on effect, resulting in delays on the downstream stations. To the best of our knowledge, there exist no methods for automatically distinguishing between source and knock-on errors in this setting, as well as establishing a causal relation between them. Utilizing real-time information about conditions collected by a production data acquisition system, we propose a novel vehicle manufacturing analysis system, which uses deep learning to establish a link between source and knock-on errors. We benchmark three sequence-to-sequence models, and introduce a novel composite time-weighted action metric for evaluating models in this context. We evaluate our framework on a real-world car production dataset recorded by Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles. Surprisingly we find that 71.68% of sequences contain either a source or knock-on error. With respect to seq2seq model training, we find that the Transformer demonstrates a better performance compared to LSTM and GRU in this domain, in particular when the prediction range with respect to the durations of future actions is increased.

Robust Federated Learning Against Adversarial Attacks for Speech Emotion Recognition

Due to the development of machine learning and speech processing, speech emotion recognition has been a popular research topic in recent years. However, the speech data cannot be protected when it is uploaded and processed on servers in the internet-of-things applications of speech emotion recognition. Furthermore, deep neural networks have proven to be vulnerable to human-indistinguishable adversarial perturbations. The adversarial attacks generated from the perturbations may result in deep neural networks wrongly predicting the emotional states. We propose a novel federated adversarial learning framework for protecting both data and deep neural networks. The proposed framework consists of i) federated learning for data privacy, and ii) adversarial training at the training stage and randomisation at the testing stage for model robustness. The experiments show that our proposed framework can effectively protect the speech data locally and improve the model robustness against a series of adversarial attacks.