A Multivariate Control Chart for Autocorrelated Tool Wear Processes

Full automation of metal cutting processes has been a long held goal of the manufacturing industry. One key obstacle to achieving this ambition has been the inability to monitor completely the condition of the cutting tool in real time, as premature tool breakage and heavy tool wear can result in substantial costs through damage to the machinery and increasing the risk of non-conforming items that have to be scrapped or reworked. Instead, the condition of the tool has to be indirectly monitored using modern sensor technology that measures the acoustic emission, sound, spindle power and vibration of the tool during a cut. An on-line monitoring procedure for such data is proposed. Firstly, the standard deviation is extracted from each sensor signal to summarise the state of the tool after each cut. Secondly, a multivariate autoregressive state space model is specified for estimating the joint effects and cross-correlation of the sensor variables in Phase I. Then we apply a distribution-free monitoring scheme to the model residuals in Phase II, based on binomial type statistics. The proposed methodology is illustrated using a case study of titanium alloy milling (a machining process used in the manufacture of aircraft landing gears) from the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in Sheffield, UK, and is demonstrated to outperform alternative residual control charts in this application

Online network monitoring

An important problem in network analysis is the online detection of anomalous behaviour. In this paper, we introduce a network surveillance method bringing together network modelling and statistical process control. Our approach is to apply multivariate control charts based on exponential smoothing and cumulative sums in order to monitor networks generated by temporal exponential random graph models (TERGM). The latter allows us to account for temporal dependence while simultaneously reducing the number of parameters to be monitored. The performance of the considered charts is evaluated by calculating the average run length and the conditional expected delay for both simulated and real data. To justify the decision of using the TERGM to describe network data, some measures of goodness of fit are inspected. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by an empirical application, monitoring daily flights in the United States to detect anomalous patterns. © 2021, The Author(s)

On-line recognition of abnormal patterns in bivariate autocorrelated process using random forest

It is not uncommon that two or more related process quality characteristics are needed to be monitored simultaneously in production process for most of time. Meanwhile, the observations obtained online are often serially autocorrelated due to high sampling frequency and process dynamics. This goes against the statistical I.I.D assumption in using the multivariate control charts, which may lead to the performance of multivariate control charts collapse soon. Meanwhile, the process control method based on pattern recognition as a non-statistical approach is not confined by this limitation, and further provide more useful information for quality practitioners to locate the assignable causes led to process abnormalities. This study proposed a pattern recognition model using Random Forest (RF) as pattern model to detect and identify the abnormalities in bivariate autocorrelated process. The simulation experiment results demonstrate that the model is superior on recognition accuracy (RA) (97.96%) to back propagation neural networks (BPNN) (95.69%), probability neural networks (PNN) (94.31%), and support vector machine (SVM) (97.16%). When experimenting with simulated dynamic process data flow, the model also achieved better average running length (ARL) and standard deviation of ARL (SRL) than those of the four comparative approaches in most cases of mean shift magnitude. Therefore, we get the conclusion that the RF model is a promising approach for detecting abnormalities in the bivariate autocorrelated process. Although bivariate autocorrelated process is focused in this study, the proposed model can be extended to multivariate autocorrelated process control