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G. Wang, A. Ledwoch, R. Hasani, R. Grosu, A. Brintrup:
"A generative neural network model for the quality prediction of work in progress products";
Applied Soft Computing, 85 (2019), ##.

One of the key challenges in manufacturing processes is improving the accuracy of quality monitoring and prediction. This paper proposes a generative neural network model for automatically predicting work-in-progress product quality. Our approach combines an unsupervised feature-extraction step with a supervised learning method. An autoencoding neural network is trained using raw manufacturing process data to extract rich information from production line recordings. Then, the extracted features are reformed as time-series and are fed into a multi-layer perceptron for predicting product quality. Finally, the outputs are decoded into a forecast quality measure. We evaluate the performance of the generative model on a case study from a powder metallurgy process. Our experimental results suggest that our method can precisely capture the defective products.

Autoencoder, Generative models, Quality prediction, Time-delayed neural networks, Powder metallurgy

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/2019.105683