6. Conclusions
Deep learning provides advanced analytics and offers great potentials to smart manufacturing in the age of big data. By unlocking the unprecedented amount of data into actionable and insightful information, deep learning gives decision-makers new visibility into their operations, as well as real-time performance measures and costs. To facilitate advanced analytics, a comprehensive overview of deep learning techniques is presented with the applications to smart manufacturing. Four typical deep learning models including Convolutional Neural Network, Restricted Boltzmann Machine, Auto Encoder, and Recurrent Neural Network are discussed in detail. The emerging research effort of deep learning in applications of manufacturing is also summarized. Despite of the promising results reported so far, there are still some limitations and significant challenges for further exploration. As the evolution of computing resources (e.g., cloud computing [119–124], fog computing [125,126], etc.), computational intelligence including deep learning may be push into cloud, enabling more convenient and on-demand computing services for smart manufacturing.