Towards Semantic Integration of Machine Vision Systems to Aid Manufacturing Event Understanding

A manufacturing paradigm shift from conventional control pyramids to decentralized, service-oriented, and cyber-physical systems (CPSs) is taking place in today's 4th industrial revolution. Generally accepted roles and implementation recipes of cyber systems are expected to be standardized in the future of manufacturing industry. The authors intend to develop a novel CPS-enabled control architecture that accommodates: (1) intelligent information systems involving domain knowledge, empirical model, and simulation; (2) fast and secured industrial communication networks; (3) cognitive automation by rapid signal analytics and machine learning (ML) based feature extraction; (4) interoperability between machine and human. Semantic integration of process indicators is fundamental to the success of such implementation. This work proposes an automated semantic integration of data-intensive process signals that is deployable to industrial signal-based control loops. The proposed system rapidly infers manufacturing events from image-based data feeds, and hence triggers process control signals. Two image inference approaches are implemented: cloud-based ML model query and edge-end object shape detection. Depending on use cases and task requirements, these two approaches can be designated with different event detection tasks to provide a comprehensive system self-awareness. Coupled with conventional industrial sensor signals, machine vision system can rapidly understand manufacturing scenes, and feed extracted semantic information to a manufacturing ontology developed by either expert or ML-enabled cyber systems. Moreover, extracted signals are interpreted by Programmable Logical Controllers (PLCs) and field devices for cognitive automation towards fully autonomous industrial systems.