ASTNet: Asynchronous Spatio-Temporal Network for Large-Scale Chemical Sensor Forecasting

The chemical industry is faced with the urgent challenge of effectively harnessing the vast amounts of time-series data generated by thousands of sensors, which is essential for forecasting chemical states, achieving accurate real-time control of production processes. Traditional forecasting methods suffer from high computational latency and struggle with the complexity of spatiotemporal dependencies. As a result, modeling this data becomes challenging. This paper introduces a novel approach, referred to as ASTNet, designed to address these challenges. ASTNet integrates an asynchronous spatiotemporal modeling framework that combines temporal and spatial encoders, enabling concurrent learning of temporal and spatial dependencies while reducing computational latency. Additionally, it introduces a gated graph fusion mechanism that adaptively combines static (meta) and evolving (dynamic) sensor graphs, enhancing the handling of heterogeneous sensor data and spatial correlations. Extensive experiments on three real-world chemical sensor datasets demonstrate that ASTNet outperforms SOTA methods in terms of both prediction accuracy and computational efficiency, making ASTNet successfully deployed in chemical engineering industrial scenarios.