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Manufacturers today are increasingly connected as part of a smart and connected community. This transformation offers great potential to deepen their collaborations through resource and knowledge sharing. While the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) have been increasingly demonstrated for data-driven modeling, data privacy has remained a major concern. Consequently, information embedded in data collected by individual manufacturers is typically siloed within the bounds of the data owners and thus under-utilized. This paper describes an approach to tackling this challenge by federated learning, where each data owner contributes to the creation of a global data model by computing a local update of relevant model parameters based on its own data. The local updates are then aggregated by a central server to train a global model. Since only the model parameters instead of the data are shared across the various data owners, data-privacy is preserved. Evaluation using sensor data for machine condition monitoring has shown that the global model produced by federated learning is more accurate and robust than the local models established by each of the single data owners. The result demonstrates the benefit of secure information sharing for individual manufacturers, especially Small and Mid-Sized Manufacturers (SMMs), for improved sustainable operation. 

Abstract Today’s manufacturing systems are becoming increasingly complex, dynamic, and connected. The factory operations face challenges of highly nonlinear and stochastic activity due to the countless uncertainties and interdependencies that exist. Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI), especially Machine Learning (ML) have shown great potential to transform the manufacturing domain through advanced analytics tools for processing the vast amounts of manufacturing data generated, known as Big Data. The focus of this paper is threefold: (1) review the state-of-the-art applications of AI to representative manufacturing problems, (2) provide a systematic view for analyzing data and process dependencies at multiple levels that AI must comprehend, and (3) identify challenges and opportunities to not only further leverage AI for manufacturing, but also influence the future development of AI to better meet the needs of manufacturing. To satisfy these objectives, the paper adopts the hierarchical organization widely practiced in manufacturing plants in examining the interdependencies from the overall system level to the more detailed granular level of incoming material process streams. In doing so, the paper considers a wide range of topics from throughput and quality, supervisory control in human–robotic collaboration, process monitoring, diagnosis, and prognosis, finally to advances in materials engineering to achieve desired material property in process modeling and control.