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In most data analytic applications in manufacturing, understanding the data‐driven models plays a crucial role in complementing the engineering knowledge about the production process. Identifying relevant input variables, rather than only predicting the response through some "black‐box" model, is of great interest in many applications. There is, therefore, a growing focus on describing the contributions of the input variables to the model in the form of "variable importance", which is readily available in certain machine learning methods such as random forest (RF). Once a ranking based on the importance measure of the variables is established, the question of how many variables are truly relevant in predicting the output variable rises. In this study, we focus on the Boruta algorithm, which is a wrapper around the RF model. It is a variable selection tool that assesses the variable importance measure for the RF model. It has been previously shown in the literature that the correlation among the input variables, which is often a common occurrence in high dimensional data, distorts and overestimates the importance of variables. The Boruta algorithm is also affected by this resulting in a larger set of input variables deemed important. To overcome this issue, in this study, we propose an extension of the Boruta algorithm for the correlated data by exploiting the conditional importance measure. This extension greatly improves the Boruta algorithm in the case of high correlation among variables and provides a more precise ranking of the variables that significantly contribute to the response. We believe this approach can be used in many industrial applications by providing more transparency and understanding of the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many industrial applications, obtaining labeled observations is not straightforward as it often requires the intervention of human experts or the use of expensive testing equipment. In these circumstances, active learning can be highly beneficial in suggesting the most informative data points to be used when fitting a model. Reducing the number of observations needed for model development alleviates both the computational burden required for training and the operational expenses related to labeling. Online active learning, in particular, is useful in high‐volume production processes where the decision about the acquisition of the label for a data point needs to be taken within an extremely short time frame. However, despite the recent efforts to develop online active learning strategies, the behavior of these methods in the presence of outliers has not been thoroughly examined. In this work, we investigate the performance of online active linear regression in contaminated data streams. Our study shows that the currently available query strategies are prone to sample outliers, whose inclusion in the training set eventually degrades the predictive performance of the models. To address this issue, we propose a solution that bounds the search area of a conditional D‐optimal algorithm and uses a robust estimator. Our approach strikes a balance between exploring unseen regions of the input space and protecting against outliers. Through numerical simulations, we show that the proposed method is effective in improving the performance of online active learning in the presence of outliers, thus expanding the potential applications of this powerful tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sensor implementation together with data processing in manufacturing provides continuous measurements enabling process monitoring, optimization, and automation. Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies are shifting from one-off and prototyping production to batch, mass, and continuous production. Current AM technologies are mostly focused on small production devices, without monitoring systems. This study aims to bring AM closer to automation by proposing an online monitor system for bottom-up photopolymerization AM (VPP) systems. The sensor-generated data is used to capture the detachment error of built parts from the build platform that otherwise cannot be observed physically by the machine operator. The detachment itself will not stop the build job, which results in lost material and operating time. The online monitoring procedure consists of two phases, an offline and an online one, respectively. The offline phase is used for training a prediction model to be used in connection with a control chart for online monitoring. The monitoring control chart is advantageous as only the detachment predictions need to be recorded. The research carried out in this article brings novelty in both the vat photopolymerization set-up, as well as in an online monitoring procedure that can be easily extended to similar technologies. [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]

The concurrent use of statistical process control and engineering process control involves monitoring manipulated and controlled variables. One multivariate control chart may handle the statistical monitoring of all variables, but observing the manipulated and controlled variables in separate control charts may improve understanding of how disturbances and the controller performance affect the process. In this article, we illustrate how step and ramp disturbances manifest themselves in a single‐input–single‐output system by studying their resulting signatures in the controlled and manipulated variables. The system is controlled by variations of the widely used proportional‐integral‐derivative(PID) control scheme. Implications for applying control charts for these scenarios are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering process control and high-dimensional, time-dependent data present great methodological challenges when applying statistical process control (SPC) and design of experiments (DoE) in continuous industrial processes. Process simulators with an ability to mimic these challenges are instrumental in research and education. This article focuses on the revised Tennessee Eastman process simulator providing guidelines for its use as a testbed for SPC and DoE methods. We provide flowcharts that can support new users to get started in the Simulink/Matlab framework, and illustrate how to run stochastic simulations for SPC and DoE applications using the Tennessee Eastman process. [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]

Industrial manufacturing processes often operate under closed-loop control, where automation aims to keep important process variables at their set-points. In process industries such as pulp, paper, chemical and steel plants, it is often hard to find production processes operating in open loop. Instead, closed-loop control systems will actively attempt to minimize the impact of process disturbances. However, we argue that an implicit assumption in most experimental investigations is that the studied system is open loop, allowing the experimental factors to freely affect the important system responses. This scenario is typically not found in process industries. The purpose of this article is therefore to explore issues of experimental design and analysis in processes operating under closed-loop control and to illustrate how Design of Experiments can help in improving and optimizing such processes. The Tennessee Eastman challenge process simulator is used as a test-bed to highlight two experimental scenarios. The first scenario explores the impact of experimental factors that may be considered as disturbances in the closed-loop system. The second scenario exemplifies a screening design using the set-points of controllers as experimental factors. We provide examples of how to analyze the two scenarios. © 2017 The Authors Quality and Reliability Engineering International Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An unsupervised fault detection and diagnosis scheme based on orthogonal autoencoders is proposed for the monitoring of industrial and chemical processes. • The use of integrated gradients allows for exploration of the bottleneck of the autoencoder, providing candidate variables for the root cause analysis. • The proposed method performs well compared to traditional methods in offering compelling and interpretable results. • The analysis shows how the difference in the way faults are introduced affects the detection and diagnosis performances of principal component analysis-based control charts. In recent years, there have been studies focusing on the use of different types of autoencoders (AEs) for monitoring complex nonlinear data coming from industrial and chemical processes. However, in many cases the focus was placed on detection. As a result, practitioners are encountering problems in trying to interpret such complex models and obtaining candidate variables for root cause analysis once an alarm is raised. This paper proposes a novel statistical process control (SPC) framework based on orthogonal autoencoders (OAEs). OAEs regularize the loss function to ensure no correlation among the features of the latent variables. This is extremely beneficial in SPC tasks, as it allows for the invertibility of the covariance matrix when computing the Hotelling T 2 statistic, significantly improving detection and diagnosis performance when the process variables are highly correlated. To support the fault diagnosis and identification analysis, we propose an adaptation of the integrated gradients (IG) method. Numerical simulations and the benchmark Tennessee Eastman Process are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach by comparing it to traditional approaches as principal component analysis (PCA) and kernel PCA (KPCA). In the analysis, we explore how the information useful for fault detection and diagnosis is stored in the intermediate layers of the encoder network. We also investigate how the correlation structure of the data affects the detection and diagnosis of faulty variables. The results show how the combination of OAEs and IG represents a compelling and ready-to-use solution, offering improved detection and diagnosis performances over the traditional methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article demonstrates how to characterize the behavior of a chemical manufacturing process using a time series model to control and adjust the manufacturing process. The authors discuss a different interpretation of the word control, and consider the situation where the process is adjusted whenever data coming from the process indicates that the process is too far from a given target value. They describe the idea behind time series control of a process and proceed more intuitively and use the chemical process as an illustrative example.

This article presents an analysis of time series data from industrial processes. The time series considered is consists of 197 consecutive concentration observations from a full-scale chemical process. Computation of the sample autocorrelation function is presented. It is concluded that the nonstationary model with the interpretation that the exponentially moving average represents is the best estimate of the current level of the process.

Describes an assessment of delayed dynamic relationships between input and output in quality control processes using the theory originally developed by Box and Jenkins. Gas furnace used by Box and Jenkins to assess the relationship between an input and an output in process control; Overview of the estimated cross-correlation function between the input gas feed rate and the output carbon dioxide; Steps involved in prewhitening the input.

The article demonstrates a few techniques in monitoring industrial processes. Graphical and statistical tools that can be used when dealing with multivariate situations are presented. An example of monitoring the temperature of an industrial process at five different locations is also explained. Principal component analysis can be used when trying to uncover the structure of a large multidimensional data set.

*Edited by Søren Bisgaard [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the use of variogram in statistical quality control process. Temperature readings from a ceramic furnace; Periodicities in stationary process.

Computers are increasingly employed to monitor the performance of complex systems. An important issue is how to evaluate the performance of such monitors. In this article we introduce a three-dimensional representation that we call a “waterfall chart” of the probability of an alarm as a function of time and the condition of the system. It combines and shows the conceptual relationship between the cumulative distribution function of the run length and the power function. The value of this tool is illustrated with an application to Page's one-sided Cusum algorithm. However, it can be applied in general for any monitoring system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]