An Explainable IoT-Enabled Predictive Maintenance Framework Using Digital Twin and Multi-Sensor Machine Learning

Abstract

In Industry 4.0 manufacturing, predictive maintenance has emerged as a key focus to ensure the reliability of operations, minimize downtime, and contribute to equipment safety. This study proposes a predictive maintenance framework for additive manufacturing systems (AMSs) using an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and machine learning (ML) approach, which is supported by real-time multi-sensor monitoring and is synchronized with a digital twin architecture. A heterogeneous dataset of over 10,000 observations and 13 sensor attributes was gathered from a sensing architecture with ESP32 cameras designed to handle heterogeneous signals from thermal, environmental, mechanical and safety-related sensors. Domain-aware feature engineering was done to gain insights into operation indicators such as temperature instability, vibration degradation, smoke risk, humidity anomalies and aggregated maintenance risk scores. Multiple predictive models, such as the Random Forest model, XGBoost model, Logistic Regression model, K-Nearest Neighbours classifier, Multi-Layer Perceptron model, and ARIMA forecast model, were comparatively assessed under highly imbalanced maintenance conditions. The results showed that ensemble learning methods, especially XGBoost and MLP, had better recall and ROC-AUC for fault detection of maintenance-critical problems. SHAP and LIME analyses then showed that a number of physically meaningful indicators, including thermal instability, vibration anomalies, smoke-related features, and aggregated risk scores, have a significant impact on maintenance predictions and hence provide better operational interpretability and maintenance transparency.