Enhancing Predictive Maintenance in Mining Mobile Machinery through a TinyML-enabled Hierarchical Inference Network

Abstract

Mining machinery operating in variable environments faces high wear and unpredictable stress, challenging Predictive Maintenance (PdM). This paper introduces the Edge Sensor Network for Predictive Maintenance (ESN-PdM), a hierarchical inference framework across edge devices, gateways, and cloud services for real-time condition monitoring. The system dynamically adjusts inference locations--on-device, on-gateway, or on-cloud--based on trade-offs among accuracy, latency, and battery life, leveraging Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) techniques for model optimization on resource-constrained devices. Performance evaluations showed that on-sensor and on-gateway inference modes achieved over 90\% classification accuracy, while cloud-based inference reached 99\%. On-sensor inference reduced power consumption by approximately 44\%, enabling up to 104 hours of operation. Latency was lowest for on-device inference (3.33 ms), increasing when offloading to the gateway (146.67 ms) or cloud (641.71 ms). The ESN-PdM framework provides a scalable, adaptive solution for reliable anomaly detection and PdM, crucial for maintaining machinery uptime in remote environments. By balancing accuracy, latency, and energy consumption, this approach advances PdM frameworks for industrial applications.