Abstract: Within manufacturing processes, faults and failures may cause severe economic loss. With the vision of Industry 4.0, artificial intelligence techniques such as data mining play a crucial role in automatic fault and failure prediction. However, data mining especially pattern mining results normally lack both machine and human understandable representation and interpretation of knowledge, bringing obstacles to novice users to interpret the prediction results.

To tackle this issue, in this paper we introduce a novel hybrid approach to facilitate predictive maintenance tasks in manufacturing processes. The proposed approach is a combination of data mining and semantics, within which chronicle mining is used to predict the future failures of the monitored industrial machinery, and a Manufacturing Predictive Maintenance Ontology (MPMO) with its rule-based extension is used to predict temporal constraints of failures and to represent the predictive results formally. As a result, Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules are constructed for predicting occurrence time of machinery failures in the future. The proposed rules provide explicit knowledge representation and semantic enrichment of failure prediction results, thus easing the understanding of the inferred knowledge. A case study on a semi-conductor manufacturing process is used to demonstrate our approach in detail.

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