Quantile-Led Feature Extraction for Multi-Horizon Predictive Maintenance in Industrial Manufacturing Systems

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.

Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction is essential for industrial predictive maintenance, yet many learning-based approaches rely on extensive feature engineering or large labeled datasets to train task-specific sequence models. In this work, we introduce a lightweight learning approach, in which we leverage a frozen pretrained time-series foundation model (TSFM) and combine it with a small regression head for RUL estimation from multivariate sensor streams. More specifically, we use Chronos-2 as a frozen backbone to extract context window features and train a lightweight regression neural network for RUL prediction. Experiments on real-world industrial sensor data from two device types show that Chronos-2 features consistently improve over recurrent, convolutional, Transformer-based, and gradient-boosting baselines under the same preprocessing and evaluation protocol. We further analyze the impact of context length and find that performance improves significantly with longer histories, indicating that TSFM representation offer a practical and data-efficient alternative for RUL estimation in industrial settings.

Predictive maintenance in complex systems is often complicated by the heterogeneity and redundancy of monitored variables,which can obscure fault-relevant information and reduce model interpretability. This work proposes a semantic feature segmentation framework that decomposes the monitored feature space into a canonical component,expected to retain the dominant predictive information, and a residual component containing structurally peripheral signals. The segmentation is defined through domain informed criteria and sets up monitoring variables into functional groups reflecting operational mechanisms such as throughput,latency,pressure,network activity,and structural state. To evaluate the effectiveness of this decomposition, we adopt a predictive perspective in which expected predictive risk is used as an operational proxy for task-relevant information. Experimental results obtained through time-aware cross-validation show that the canonical space consistently achieves lower predictive risk than the residual space across multiple temporal configurations, indicating that the semantic segmentation concentrates the most relevant information for fault anticipation. In addition, the canonical segments exhibit significantly stronger intra-segment coherence than inter-segment dependence, and this structural organization remains stable after redundancy reduction. When compared with the full feature space and with a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) representation, the canonical space carries out comparable predictive performance and furthermore preserves the semantic meaning of the original variables. These findings suggest that semantic feature segmentation provides an interpretable and information-preserving decomposition of monitoring signals, enabling competitive predictive performance without sacrificing the operational interpretability required in predictive maintenance applications.