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In the era of big data, companies are increasingly driven to amass vast amounts of data, particularly in process industries where advanced sensor technologies are prevalent. However, obtaining accurate labels or product information through quality inspections can be prohibitively expensive. Active learning emerges as a promising approach to optimize data sampling by prioritizing the most informative data points. Nevertheless, active learning strategies heavily rely on predictive models that are iteratively updated. Aligning with the principles of data-centric AI, this study highlights the detrimental effects of passively incorporating all available process variables into a predictive model for guiding data collection. Specifically, in real-time sampling strategies based on online active learning, the inclusion of irrelevant features significantly hampers the efficiency of the learning process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data‐driven process monitoring and control techniques and their application to industrial chemical processes are gaining popularity due to the current focus on Industry 4.0, digitalization and the Internet of Things. However, for the development of such techniques, there are significant barriers that must be overcome in obtaining sufficiently large and reliable datasets. As a result, the use of real plant and process data in developing and testing data‐driven process monitoring and control tools can be difficult without investing significant efforts in acquiring, treating, and interpreting the data. Therefore, researchers need a tool that effortlessly generates large amounts of realistic and reliable process data without the requirement for additional data treatment or interpretation. In this work, we propose a data generation platform based on the Tennessee Eastman Process simulation benchmark. A graphical user interface (GUI) developed in MATLAB Simulink is presented that enables users to generate massive amounts of data for testing applicability of big data concepts in the realm of process control for continuous time‐dependent processes. An R‐Shiny app that interacts with the data generation tool is also presented for illustration purposes. The app can visualize the results generated by the Tennessee Eastman Process and can carry out a standard fault detection and diagnosis studies based on PCA. The data generator GUI is available free of charge for research purposes at https://github.com/dtuprodana/TEP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manufacturing has been rejuvenated by automation and digitalization. This has brought forth the new industrial era also called Industry 4.0. During the last few years, we have collaborated with companies from various industries that have all been going through this transformation. Through these collaborations, we have collected numerous examples of (sometimes troublesome) experiences with Big Data applications of production analytics. These experiences reflect the current state of production data and the challenges it poses. Our goal in this paper is to share those experiences and lessons learned in dealing with practical issues from data acquisition to data management and finally to data analytics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The expanding availability of complex data structures requires development of new analysis methods for process understanding and monitoring. In manufacturing, this is primarily due to high‐frequency and high‐dimensional data available through automated data collection schemes and sensors. However, particularly for fast production rate situations, data on the quality characteristics of the process output tend to be scarcer than the available process data. There has been a considerable effort in incorporating latent structure–based methods in the context of complex data. The research question addressed in this paper is to make use of latent structure–based methods in the pursuit of better predictions using all available data including the process data for which there are no corresponding output measurements, ie, unlabeled data. Inspiration for the research question comes from an industrial setting where there is a need for prediction with extremely low tolerances. A semi‐supervised principal component regression method is compared against benchmark latent structure–based methods, principal components regression, and partial least squares, on simulated and experimental data. In the analysis, we show the circumstances in which it becomes more advantageous to use the semi‐supervised principal component regression over these competing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the goals of ensuring process safety and energy efficiency become ever more challenging, engineers increasingly rely on data collected from such processes for informed decision making. During recent decades, extracting and interpreting valuable process information from large historical data sets have been an active area of research. Among the methods used, principal component analysis (PCA) is a well-established technique that allows for dimensionality reduction for large data sets by finding new uncorrelated variables, namely principal components (PCs). However, it is difficult to interpret the derived PCs, as each PC is a linear combination of all of the original variables and the loadings are typically nonzero. Sparse principal component analysis (SPCA) is a relatively recent technique proposed for producing PCs with sparse loadings via the variance-sparsity trade-off. We propose a forward SPCA approach that helps uncover the underlying process knowledge regarding variable relations. This approach systematically determines the optimal sparse loadings for each sparse PC while improving interpretability and minimizing information loss. The salient features of the proposed approach are demonstrated through the Tennessee Eastman process simulation. The results indicate how knowledge and process insight can be discovered through a systematic analysis of sparse loadings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]