A Minimal-Sensing Framework for Monitoring Multistage Manufacturing Processes Using Product Quality Measurements

For implementing data analytic tools in real-world applications, researchers face major challenges such as the complexity of machines or processes, their dynamic operating regimes and the limitations on the availability, sufficiency and quality of the data measured by sensors. The limits on using sensors are often related to the costs associated with them and the inaccessibility of critical locations within machines or processes. Manufacturing processes, as a large group of applications in which data analytics can bring significant value to, are the focus of this study. As the cost of instrumenting the machines in a manufacturing process is significant, an alternative solution which relies solely on product quality measurements is greatly desirable in the manufacturing industry. In this paper, a minimal-sensing framework for machine anomaly detection in multistage manufacturing processes based on product quality measurements is introduced. This framework, which relies on product quality data along with products’ manufacturing routes, allows the detection of variations in the quality of the products and is able to pinpoint the machine which is the cause of anomaly. A moving window is applied to the data, and a statistical metric is extracted by comparing the performance of a machine to its peers. This approach is expanded to work for multistage processes. The proposed method is validated using a dataset from a real-world manufacturing process and additional simulated datasets. Moreover, an alternative approach based on Bayesian Networks is provided and the performance of the two proposed methods is evaluated from an industrial implementation perspective. The results showed that the proposed similarity-based approach was able to successfully identify the root cause of the quality variations and pinpoint the machine that adversely impacted the product quality.