In the increasingly complex industrial system health management domain, accurate prediction of remaining useful life plays an essential role. This paper analyzes the methods to improve the predictive performance of remaining useful life from three aspects: optimizing model structures, augmenting uncertainty estimation in predictions, and transitioning normalization methods. Based on our analysis, we propose a novel model, the Uncertainty Spatial-Temporal Attention Graph Neural Network (USTAGNN), which consists of three primary components: sensor graph construction, a spatio-temporal feature extractor, and a probabilistic prediction module. The feature extractor leverages graph neural networks and temporal convolutional networks as a foundation to extract spatial and temporal features, further enhanced by attention mechanisms, spectral normalization, and residual connections to bolster its distance awareness. Following extensive experimental comparisons, we utilized the parameter-driven dynamic adjacency matrix for sensor graph construction and the deep kernel Gaussian process for precise uncertainty estimation. USTAGNN tries to resolve issues not thoroughly addressed in existing research, such as comparative analyses of sensor graph construction methods, accurate uncertainty estimation, and the model’s generalization under different preprocessing conditions. The proposed model demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on various subsets of the C-MAPSS dataset, achieving up to a 35.9% improvement in prediction score.

Ensuring the reliability of critical industrial systems across various sectors is crucial. It is essential to detect deviations from regular behaviour to mitigate disruptions and preserve infrastructure integrity. However, accurately labelling anomaly datasets is challenging due to their rarity and manual annotation subjectivity. The conventional approach of training separate models for each dataset entity further complicates model development. This paper presents a novel Multi-task Learning framework combining LSTM Autoencoder with temporal attention mechanism (MTL-LATAM) for effective time series anomaly detection. Multitask learning models improve adaptability and generalizability, leading to reduced runtime and compute power while supporting zero-shot evaluation. These models offer flexibility in detecting emerging anomalies. Additionally, we introduce a dynamic thresholding mechanism to incorporate temporal context for anomaly detection and provide visualizations of attention weights to enhance interpretability. The study compares MTL- LATAM, with other multi-task models, evaluates multi-task versus single-task models and assesses the performance of the proposed frame- work in zero-shot learning scenarios. The findings indicate MTL- LATAM’s effectiveness across real-world and open-source datasets, achieving 95% and 97% task synergy. The results underscore the superior performance of multi-task models in zero-shot tasks compared to individual models trained exclusively on their respective datasets.

Self-aware computing systems enable computing systems to reflect on their actions and behavior. This becomes even more relevant in Cyber-Physical Systems where computing systems have to control and interact with elements in the real world. This paper reports on recent advances made in computational self-awareness for cyber-physical systems.

In this work, we apply deep active learning to the field of design optimization to reduce the number of computationally expensive numerical simulations widely used in industry and engineering. We are interested in optimizing the design of structural components, where a set of parameters describes the shape. If we can predict the performance based on these parameters and consider only the promising candidates for simulation, there is an enormous potential for saving computing power. We present two query strategies for self-optimization to reduce the computational cost in multi-objective design optimization problems. Our proposed methodology provides an intuitive approach that is easy to apply, offers significant improvements over random sampling, and circumvents the need for uncertainty estimation. We evaluate our strategies on a large dataset from the domain of fluid dynamics and introduce two new evaluation metrics to determine the model's performance. Findings from our evaluation highlights the effectiveness of our query strategies in accelerating design optimization. Furthermore, the introduced method is easily transferable to other self-optimization problems in industry and engineering.

The research initiative “self-improving system integration” (SISSY) was established with the goal to master the ever-changing demands of system organisation in the presence of autonomous subsystems, evolving architectures, and highly-dynamic open environments. It aims to move integration-related decisions from design-time to run-time, implying a further shift of expertise and responsibility from human engineers to autonomous systems . This introduces a qualitative shift from existing self-adaptive and self-organising systems, moving from self-adaptation based on predefined variation types, towards more open contexts involving novel autonomous subsystems, collaborative behaviours, and emerging goals. In this article, we revisit existing SISSY research efforts and establish a corresponding terminology focusing on how SISSY relates to the broad field of integration sciences. We then investigate SISSY-related research efforts and derive a taxonomy of SISSY technology. This is concluded by establishing a research road-map for developing operational self-improving self-integrating systems.

Heterogeneous domain adaptation adapts a machine learning model, here classification model, from a source domain to a target domain to leverage data from both domains. Thereby, supervised heterogeneous domain adaptation expects labeled data from the target domain, while unsupervised heterogeneous domain adaptation does not. In this article, we study the inclusion of active learning to bridge unsupervised and supervised domain adaptation. The active learning approach iteratively queries the most useful instances from the target domain, which are then labeled and used to improve the classification model. Using active learning, the selection of training instances can focus on areas where ambiguity in the source domain resolves in the target domain. Hence, we achieve the same performance with fewer labels. Experiments on real activity recognition data confirm our claims.