Coupling digital simulation and machine learning metamodel through an active learning approach in Industry 4.0 context

Abstract Although digital simulations are becoming increasingly important in the industrial world owing to the transition toward Industry 4.0, as well as the development of digital twin technologies, they have become increasingly computationally intensive. Many authors have proposed the use of machine learning (ML) metamodels to alleviate this cost and take advantage of the enormous amount of data that are currently available in industry. In an industrial context, it is necessary to continuously train predictive models integrated into decision support systems to ensure the consistency of their prediction quality over time. This led the authors to investigate active learning (AL) concepts in the particular context of the sawmilling industry. In this paper, a method based on AL is proposed to combine simulation and an ML metamodel that is trained incrementally using only selected data (smart data). A case study based on the sawmilling industry and experiments are shown, the results of which prove the possible advantages of this approach.