A survey on machine learning based analysis of heterogeneous data in industrial automation

In many application domains data from different sources are increasingly available to thoroughly monitor and describe a system or device. Especially within the industrial automation domain, heterogeneous data and its analysis gain a lot of attention from research and industry, since it has the potential to improve or enable tasks like diagnostics, predictive maintenance, and condition monitoring. For data analysis, machine learning based approaches are mostly used in recent literature, as these algorithms allow us to learn complex correlations within the data. To analyze even heterogeneous data and gain benefits from it in an application, data from different sources need to be integrated, stored, and managed to apply machine learning algorithms. In a setting with heterogeneous data sources, the analysis algorithms should also be able to handle data source failures or newly added data sources. In addition, existing knowledge should be used to improve the machine learning based analysis or its training process. To find existing approaches for the machine learning based analysis of heterogeneous data in the industrial automation domain, this paper presents the result of a systematic literature review. The publications were reviewed, evaluated, and discussed concerning five requirements that are derived in this paper. We identified promising solutions and approaches and outlined open research challenges, which are not yet covered sufficiently in the literature.