The Future of PHM Could be Tiny under Cloud: Exploring Potential Application Patterns of TinyML in PHM Scenarios

Abstract

Deep learning has shown impressive performance acrosshealth management and prognostics applications. Nowadays, an emerging trend of machine learning deployment on resource constraint hardware devices like micro-controllers(MCU) has aroused much attention. Given the distributed andresource constraint nature of many PHM applications, using tiny machine learning models close to data source sensors for on-device inferences would be beneficial to save both time andadditional hardware resources. Even though there has beenpast works that bring TinyML on MCUs for some PHM ap-plications, they are mainly targeting single data source usage without higher-level data incorporation with cloud computing.We study the impact of potential cooperation patterns betweenTinyML on edge and more powerful computation resources oncloud and how this would make an impact on the application patterns in data-driven prognostics. We introduce potential ap-plications where sensor readings are utilized for system health status prediction including status classification and remaining useful life regression. We find that MCUs and cloud com-puting can be adaptive to different kinds of machine learning models and combined in flexible ways for diverse requirement.Our work also shows limitations of current MCU-based deep learning in data-driven prognostics And we hope our work can