Intelligent predictive maintenance of hydraulic systems based on virtual knowledge graph

In the manufacturing industry, a hydraulic system harnesses liquid fluid power to create powerful machines. Under the trend of Industry 4.0, the predictive maintenance of hydraulic systems is transforming to more intelligent and automated approaches that leverage the strong power of artificial intelligence and data science technologies. However, due to the knowledge-intensive and heterogeneous nature of the manufacturing domain, the data and information required for predictive maintenance are normally collected from ubiquitous sensing networks. This leads to the gap between massive heterogeneous data/information resources in hydraulic system components and the limited cognitive ability of system users. Moreover, how to capture and structure useful domain knowledge (in a machine-readable way) for solving domain-specific tasks remains an open challenge for the predictive maintenance of hydraulic systems. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose a virtual knowledge graph-based approach for the digital modeling and intelligent predictive analytics of hydraulic systems. We evaluate the functionalities and effectiveness of the proposed approach on a predictive maintenance task under real-world industrial contexts. Results show that our proposed approach is capable and feasible to be implemented for digital modeling, data access, data integration, and predictive analytics.