DyEdgeGAT: Dynamic Edge via Graph Attention for Early Fault Detection in IIoT Systems

In the industrial Internet of Things, condition monitoring sensor signals from complex systems often exhibit strong nonlinear and stochastic spatial-temporal dynamics under varying operating conditions. Such complex dynamics make fault detection particularly challenging. Although previously proposed methods effectively model these dynamics, they often neglect the dynamic evolution of relationships between sensor signals. Undetected shifts in these relationships can potentially result in significant system failures. Another limitation is their inability to effectively distinguish between novel operating conditions and actual faults. To address this gap, we propose DyEdgeGAT (Dynamic Edge via Graph Attention), a novel approach capable of detecting various faults, especially those characterized by relationship changes at early stages, while distinguishing faults from novel operating conditions. DyEdgeGAT is a graph-based framework that provides a novel graph inference scheme for multivariate time series that dynamically constructs edges to represent and track the evolution of relationships between time series. Additionally, it addresses a commonly overlooked aspect: the cause-and-effect relationships within the system, such as between control inputs and measurements. By incorporating system-independent variables as contexts of operating conditions into node dynamics extraction, DyEdgeGAT enhances its robustness against novel operating conditions. We rigorously evaluate DyEdgeGAT's performance using both a synthetic dataset, designed to simulate varying levels of fault severity and a real-world industrial-scale benchmark containing a variety of fault types with different detection complexities. Our findings demonstrate that DyEdgeGAT is highly effective in fault detection, showing particular strength in early fault detection while maintaining robustness under novel operating conditions.