SMOCS: A Streaming Framework for Simplified Deployment, Monitoring, and Optimization of ML Systems in Production

2026-07-02

AI Summary

This work addresses the practical challenges of deploying machine learning models in real-world settings, where heterogeneous data protocols, non-standard formats, and infrastructure constraints often necessitate redundant construction of integration pipelines. To overcome these issues, we propose SMOCS—a containerized, streaming ML system built on Apache Kafka—that decouples infrastructure from application logic through layered abstraction and employs a three-threaded agent architecture to separate data ingestion, online training, and real-time inference. The framework enables configuration-driven, no-code deployment, offering platform independence, fault isolation, and horizontal scalability, thereby significantly lowering the barrier to entry for domain experts. SMOCS has been open-sourced on the Jefferson Lab GitHub repository and demonstrates both continuous online learning capability and strong engineering practicality.

Abstract

Machine learning has demonstrated significant potential for real-time monitoring, optimization, and control of scientific facilities. However, deploying and maintaining ML models in operational environments remains a substantial engineering challenge. Each facility presents unique data protocols, non-standard formats, and infrastructure constraints, forcing teams to rebuild integration pipelines for every new application. We present SMOCS (Streaming Monitoring Optimization and Control System), a Kafka-based containerized framework that addresses this challenge through three contributions: 1) a layered abstraction over Apache Kafka that separates infrastructure from application logic, 2) a three-thread agent architecture that temporally decouples data ingestion, model training, and real-time inference enabling continuous online learning from live data streams, and 3) a configuration-driven deployment model that enables domain experts to operate ML pipelines without software engineering expertise. SMOCS is facility platform-agnostic, fault-isolated by design, and horizontally scalable through Docker containerization. The framework is publicly available as open-source software on the Jefferson Lab Github.

Problem

• machine learning deployment
• production ML systems
• integration pipelines
• infrastructure constraints
• real-time monitoring

Innovation

• streaming framework
• online learning
• Kafka abstraction
• containerized deployment
• configuration-driven ML