Trustworthy 6G-Powered Industrial IoT for Resilient Intelligent Manufacturing

The sixth generation (6G) of wireless technology is envisioned to revolutionize the industrial Internet of Things (loT) with its extended visions of immersive, massive communication and hyper-reliable and ultra-low-latency experiences. The synergy of 6G and industrial loT plays a crucial role in achieving consistent high-precision manufacturing and safe automatic production. To improve the resilience of 6G-powered industrial applications, predictive maintenance (PdM) is an important approach which can help avoid potential system interruptions by reporting equipment failures in advance and proactively scheduling maintenance actions. However, significant challenges of PdM persist, including efficiently utilizing massive sensitive data scattered across industrial environments, adapting PdM to dynamic industrial loT settings, and balancing reduced downtime with maintenance costs. Therefore, we propose a trustworthy 6G-powered distributed industrial loT framework envisioned with ubiquitous connectivity, sensing, intelligence, and advanced privacy-by-design features. Additionally, a federated deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based PdM method is designed to acquire a proactive maintenance policy in a privacy-preserving manner, aiming to minimize the total maintenance costs and revenue losses resulting from downtime. Simulation experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms conventional maintenance baselines and achieves nearly optimal performance. The proposed trustworthy 6G-pow-ered industrial loT framework, augmented by an advanced federated DRL-based PdM method, will be a valuable foundation and enabler toward achieving resilient intelligent manufacturing.