Domain-Aware Hyperdimensional Computing for Edge Smart Manufacturing

Smart manufacturing requires on-device intelligence that meets strict latency and energy budgets. HyperDimensional Computing (HDC) offers a lightweight alternative by encoding data as high-dimensional hypervectors and computing with simple operations. Prior studies often assume that the qualitative relation between HDC hyperparameters and performance is stable across applications. Our analysis of two representative tasks, signal-based quality monitoring in Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining and image-based defect detection in Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), shows that this assumption does not hold. We map how encoder type, projection variance, hypervector dimensionality, and data regime shape accuracy, inference latency, training time, and training energy. A formal complexity model explains predictable trends in encoding and similarity computation and reveals nonmonotonic interactions with retraining that preclude a closed-form optimum. Empirically, signals favor nonlinear Random Fourier Features with more exclusive encodings and saturate in accuracy beyond moderate dimensionality. Images favor linear Random Projection, achieve high accuracy with small dimensionality, and depend more on sample count than on dimensionality. Guided by these insights, we tune HDC under multiobjective constraints that reflect edge deployment and obtain models that match or exceed the accuracy of state-of-the-art deep learning and Transformer models while delivering at least 6x faster inference and more than 40x lower training energy. These results demonstrate that domain-aware HDC encoding is necessary and that tuned HDC offers a practical, scalable path to real-time industrial AI on constrained hardware. Future work will enable adaptive encoder and hyperparameter selection, expand evaluation to additional manufacturing modalities, and validate on low-power accelerators.