Predictive Failure Detection in Network Hardware Using Thermal Imaging and Deep Learning with Sensor Fusion

Fresh fruits and vegetables (FFVs) are highly perishable, and cold-chain breaks contribute significantly to global food waste. While Machine Learning (ML) can enable proactive intervention, cloud-based inference faces challenges such as latency and data loss. Fog computing addresses these issues but has been tested only in simulation for FFV cold-chain temperature prediction. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper presents its first real-world deployment. A fog-deployed LSTM-GRU model predicted cold-room temperature using LoRaWAN sensor data collected from a South African apple cold-storage facility with induced cold-chain breaks. Running entirely on a Raspberry Pi 4 with no cloud dependency, the system generated conditional SHAP explanations only when a break is predicted. The deployed system predicts cold-room temperature with an MAE of 0.2°C at roughly 0.2 kWh per day ($\approx 0.7$ Wh per prediction). Predictions were delivered in under one second (555 ms), dominated by network and messaging rather than computation, with conditional explanations adding modest cost. SHAP consumes 28% more CPU but is well within the hardware's capacity. The model attributes its predictions primarily to temperature, humidity, and their interaction. Critically, the deployment surfaced what simulation cannot: a sensor-triggered single point of failure, alongside genuine resilience, autonomous recovery from infrastructure faults and continued operation through internet loss. These are the first published deployment benchmarks for fog-based temperature prediction in FFV cold chains, establishing that explainable temperature forecasting is feasible on resource-constrained edge hardware. Future work includes asynchronous sensor fusion, commercial cold chain deployment, alternative model architectures, and causal analysis.

Long-horizon predictive maintenance requires models to distinguish slowly evolving degradation from normal operating-regime variation over planning windows measured in days rather than hours. This paper evaluates whether an explicit conditional-quantile representation provides an informative classifier interface for this problem. The proposed TQRNN30d framework combines a dual-stage quantile regression neural network (QRNN) feature extractor with a multi-stream temporal fusion classifier. Each hourly word of 81-channel machine behaviour is mapped to a 324-dimensional quantile-state representation, and 720 ordered hourly words form the 30-day document supplied to the long-horizon model. The classifier fuses quantile states with dynamic covariates, channel-level static metadata, and a 168-hour latent-history stream using gated residual processing, causal recurrent encoding, and metadata-conditioned cross-modal attention. A bounded instability-aware signal derived from sustained one-word-ahead prediction-error divergence provides auxiliary memory modulation at the longest horizon. Evaluation uses a machine-disjoint 43/14/15 train/validation/test allocation across 72 machines in nine manufacturing facilities. At 30 days, TQRNN30d achieves 79.97% F1, 80.18% recall, 81.82% precision, 82.39% accuracy, and 0.820 ROC-AUC. It leads all 18 evaluated baselines at the 7-, 14-, and 30-day fixed-threshold comparisons, with the largest F1 advantage at 14 days. The results support held-out-machine performance within the observed homogeneous nine-facility fleet, but do not establish unseen-site, cross-equipment, or cross-sector generalisation.

In this research, a novel framework is proposed for the SOH estimation, which employs a hybrid deep learning architecture of a concatenation of a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) Neural Network (NN) with the integration of Bayesian Optimization-based hyperparameter tuning for the network. Three different deep learning architectures are being evaluated: standalone recurrent models, CNN-RNN architectures and CNN-RNN combinations enhanced with intermediate Fully Connected (FC) layers. Among the three, the model with the intermediate FC layers demonstrated the highest predictive accuracy. A comprehensive feature engineering approach combines capacity (Q), voltage (V), Incremental Capacity Analysis (ICA), and Differential Voltage Analysis (DVA), with systematic evaluation of multiple combinations to identify the optimal input representation. To validate the proposed method, three publicly available datasets were utilized, ensuring reproducibility of the results, two from external sources and one developed by the author of this study using a unique experimental setup. The comparison study was performed using the Mean Absolute Error (MAE), the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and the FLoating-point OPerations (FLOPs) as evaluation metrics.