Open Access

Philipp Ruf, Christoph Reich, Djaffar Ould-Abdeslam

• Up until now, it has been shown that big parts of the so called Industry 4.0 are impacted by Machine Learning (ML) in some way or another. In many shopfloor situations, there are different sensors involved and all data is eventually structured, accumulated and prepared for application in various ML-based scenarios, e.g., predictive maintenance of a machine, quality monitoring of manufactured workpieces or handling domain-specific aspect of the respective fabricator or product. As the physical environment of Cyber Physical System (CPS) can change rapidly, the overall Data Acquisition (DAQ) process and ML training is impacted, too. This work focuses on datasets which consist of small amounts of tabular information and how to utilize them in image-based Neural Networks (NN) with respect to meta learning and multimodal transformations. Therefore, the conceptual utilization of an DAQ system in industrial environments is discussed regarding a variety of techniques for preprocessing and generating visual material from multimodal data. The outcome of such operations is a new dataset which is then applied in model training. Therefore, the presented approach is three-fold. In first analysing the concept of predicting the similarity of structured and numerical data in different datasets, indicators of the feasibility when applying the methodology in related but more sophisticated learning scenarios can be gained. Although ongoing time-series data is differing from simple multi-class data in terms of a chronologically dimension, basic classification concepts are applied to it and evaluated. In order to extend the similarity prediction with a temporal component, the discussed methods are extended by multimodal transformations and an subsequent utilization in Siamese Neural Networks (SNN). By discussing the concept of applying visual representations of structured time-series data in a meta-learning context, known trends and historic information can be utilized for generating real-world test-samples and predicting their validity on inference.