Performance Supervised Plant-Wide Process Monitoring in Industry 4.0: A Roadmap

The intensive research and development efforts directed towards large-scale complex industrial systems in the context of Industry 4.0 indicate that safety and reliability issues pose significant challenges. During online operation, system performance degradation will lead, not only to economic losses, but also potential safety hazards. In the existing research and technical routes, the target of the fault diagnosis systems is to trigger alarms to report the fact of the existence of malfunctions as well as the underlying reasons accurately. However, it remains unanswered how urgent it is to fix it, and what degrees of fault-tolerance, maintenance, and fault recovery are needed. Further analyses are necessary to evaluate the impact of the detected fault on the plant-wide performance. In this article, to enable a more comprehensive and precise description of the plant-wide operational status, the roles of the commonly used performance metrics, the state-of-the-art performance evaluation approaches, as well as the performance-oriented and plant-wide process monitoring techniques are investigated. On this basis, an alternative straightforward technical route, embedded in the cyber-physical-social system framework is proposed. A roadmap including the key research questions, the future research directions, and an outlook about the future vision is presented.