Building Equipment-Agnostic,

Flexible And Reusable

AI Models In The Mobility
Industries

White Paper

Faizan Patankar,
CEO & Co-founder,
Amygda
Summary

Today, it is unimaginable that any
software project could begin without
utilising the benefits of existing libraries
and reusing elements to develop the
project. In just a decade, the pace of
software development has skyrocketed
and its impact on the world has been
immense. The benefits of reusability
and scalability are there to see. Yet, in
the AI domain, reusability and
scalability aren’t as embedded in the
mobility industry.
The mobility industry includes the
latest trends like e-bikes, scooters,
etc., on the light side; to the more
established rail, aerospace, marine,
freight, etc., on the heavy-asset side.
This paper relates to the current state
of the art, challenges, and the
disruptive innovations time-series
foundation models can bring to the
heavy-asset mobility industry. It
provides a framework to build flexible
and reusable AI models to reduce the
time it takes to develop solutions from
months to days, and possibly minutes.
A step change that is currently
considered impossible.

Background to AI adoption in
the industrial domain

Until even a few years back, up to 2019, AI adoption in businesses was low. Between
4-6% depending on the use case, region, etc. In 2022 an IBM study with over 7000
customers in many countries pointed to 35 - 40% adoption across various industries.

AI adoption is definitely accelerating.

The challenge for enterprises isn’t whether they should or should not adopt AI, but
rather how to solve the two common barriers to AI adoption:
1. How to scale AI beyond one narrow demonstrated use case to amplify the
benefits across the business;

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 2. How to operationalise various AI models for different equipment and tasks, and
how to automate decision-making at the point of use.

In the decade between 2010 and 2020, AI truly shifted from academia into industry.
Real applications were built by learning from data. But you still needed to have prior
knowledge of the patterns you are looking for in data. In engineering, with an increase
in the volume of sensor data, the key requirement still was (and remains) well-labelled
historical data.

Problem

AI relies on annotated data, which is one of the biggest bottlenecks for further AI
adoption - even collecting data is hard, but collecting and then annotating it is even
harder, requiring a lot of time and expert labour.

Current AI solutions are built by looking at patterns represented in well-annotated

historical data and doing feature engineering to get the data in the right shape.

Once a model is produced, it is tailored to a specific use case - and can hardly be
reused for another, even a similar use case.

So for each new equipment application, you need to ensure that there’s a large,
well-annotated dataset for the task you want to tackle on that specific equipment. If a
large annotated dataset doesn’t exist, either because of a low frequency or low
accuracy of events, you turn to code in the domain knowledge through hundreds or
thousands of hours with domain experts.

This is a very expensive use of their time, and in any case, the number of experts
available now and in the future is reducing. Relying on only one source of knowledge
is not feasible.

And finally, the output of the AI is cryptic/untransparent - humans have a hard time
understanding and validating the results. Often the final blocker in embedding AI is the
lack of explainability from AI systems on how a decision was arrived at. There is a lack
of trust between humans and AI working collaboratively in the industrial domain.

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So what we have today are so-called AI systems, mostly hard-coded logic rules, that
have learned how to detect one specific narrow problem on one type of specific
equipment for a specific format of data. These are unscalable for any other tasks, and
not reusable across any other use cases.

Amygda’s vision for flexible and

reusable AI models

When I started Amygda, I wrote an article about why I founded Amygda (available on
LinkedIn). On June 27, 2020, I wrote:

“We are building the ability to ingest industrial data across various
equipment. A problem that VCs and startups still grapple with figuring out
how to do at scale. However, by solving that, we are able to be equipment
agnostic and work with various industries.”

At Amygda, we began with the vision of building flexible, reusable AI models that
could be applied to different use cases on sensor data in the engineering domain.

AI models that could self-understand the underlying representations in data. The

underlying representations could be various patterns, identifying emergence or
creating homogeneous cohorts from the data. It could be used for smart maintenance,
finding optimised routes, or even forecasting the next steps in the life of the
equipment.

These AI models will replace the use-case-specific models that have dominated the
industrial analytics landscape.

Amygda has been training models on a broad set of unlabeled raw data from various
types of equipment. These models are built using unsupervised and semi-supervised
techniques and further development is focussed on transfer learning. This has sped up

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data-centric aspects from months to days, with a vision to reduce it to minutes. The
results are encouraging and with no negative effect on the final outcome of AI models.

Right now we are testing these models with real-world use cases and learning from
the broad data. At each iteration, the time it takes to create representations in the
underlying data keeps reducing. In the future, these foundation models will be
available to customer data teams who want to avoid spending time on feature
engineering. After all, that task won’t go away, but it can be automated with
foundation models.

Amygda’s solution
Time-series foundation models to solve industry
challenges with data

Figure 1 - Amygda’s time-series foundation model vision and how it can be utilised for
multiple use cases across the transport industry

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Amygda’s AI models overcome a major challenge in the lack of large sets of
well-annotated data. In the real world that’s a good thing, because you don’t want
equipment like engines, and pumps blowing up on critical assets. So the availability of
large well-annotated data is low. But the equipment is all instrumented and the growth
in the volume of sensor data can finally pay dividends.

This unblocks the first major challenge from enterprise

customers -

How to scale AI beyond one narrow demonstrated

use case to amplify the benefits across the business?

Amygda’s AI models are scalable, and reusable on various equipment types. These
are best placed in dealing with known issues and detecting emerging issues at ease.
Customers can test on one type of equipment or use-case (anomaly detection,
predictive maintenance, optimisation, etc) and be assured that these can scale to
other equipment types.

This does not eliminate the need for experts - it enables businesses to use human
experts at the right time for the most important findings. Transferring expert human
knowledge with insights from the model will increase the output of the AI model over
time.

The second challenge and this links to the first is

How to operationalise various AI models for different

equipment and tasks into operations.

The future of work in industries involves collaboration between humans and AI, just
like at work, we work collaboratively with those we find are honest and trustworthy.
The same applies to working with AI.

If AI cannot explain the decisions, the suggestions or the recommendations it makes,

there is no way that collaboration is going to happen. So in a way, Explainable and
Trustworthy AI is a prerequisite for any successful embedding of AI in operational
processes.

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There are new techniques open-sourced and available to data scientists. But what
matters is how you explain the output of the AI to humans at the point of use. That
requires a way to operationalise and communicate these outputs. The AI application
matches the vision of reusable and scalable models. It can host several AI models and
is flexible to accommodate different use cases.

The future of AI in mobility

shifting from one use case to multiple use cases
at scale

Business stakeholders should look for ROI across tens of use cases, equipment, or
fleets. That’s the value of embedding AI. And we are building with the best stack and
demonstrating that value.

Task-specific solutions for one set of equipment is a narrow use case. It does not
scale, nor lead to any reusable models. Amygda’s AI models, on the other hand, do
take effort to build. We’ve been building the framework, architecture, and approaches
since 2021.

The approach as a business leader is to think about:

● What are the data domains for my operations?;

● Are they mixed fleets?;
● Do I have issues across the board that have the same underlying data (sensor
and other data) but different teams who deal with it?;
● How do I enable them all to make use of AI?

That’s the scenario we will start seeing in the enterprise and Amygda’s approach
towards AI models meets that demand.

By 2025, enterprise AI will be entirely run on AI models that understand the underlying
data representation and can solve multiple-use cases. Like a general-purpose sensor
data model that is pre-trained to find data representations and structure data by
merely fine-tuning. This is already happening with the language models where LLM

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foundation models have replaced use-case-specific NLP models. Obviously, these
models can’t deal with sensor data and tabular formats, etc.

This requires AI models that are reusable and flexible towards different use cases and
data formats in the engineering domain with sensor data. And an infrastructure that
can operationalise these models for several different data volumes, velocity, and
veracity.

Amygda is primed for it.

Figure 2: Hierarchy of how a time-series foundation model can become increasingly

specific to an industry or even to an enterprise customer data domain

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About

Amygda is a VC-funded AI/ML startup for MaintOps in aerospace, rail, and other
aset-heavy mobility industries.

Our proprietary, ML-based predictive maintenance stack allows the owners of

high-cost assets to dig deeper into heterogeneous, high-frequency (1Hz) data,
uncover risk and obtain actionable insights, helping save billions in reactive repair
costs, improve risk management and prevent incidents, in an OEM agnostic manner.

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Contact us

Faizan Patankar Shaheryar Khan

Co-founder and CEO Co-founder and AI Lead
Amygda Amygda
faizan@amygdalabs.com shery@amygdalabs.com

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