On-line anomaly detection with advanced independent component analysis of multi-variate residual signals from causal relation networks.

Anomaly detection in todays industrial environments is an ambitious challenge to detect possible faults/problems which may turn into severe waste during production, defects, or systems components damage, at an early stage. Data-driven anomaly detection in multi-sensor networks rely on models which are extracted from multi-sensor measurements and which characterize the anomaly-free reference situation. Therefore, significant deviations to these models indicate potential anomalies. In this paper, we propose a new approach which is based on causal relation networks (CRNs) that represent the inner causes and effects between sensor channels (or sensor nodes) in form of partial sub-relations, and evaluate its functionality and performance on two distinct production phases within a micro-fluidic chip manufacturing scenario. The partial relations are modeled by non-linear (fuzzy) regression models for characterizing the (local) degree of influences of the single causes on the effects. An advanced analysis of the multi-variate residual signals, obtained from the partial relations in the CRNs, is conducted. It employs independent component analysis (ICA) to characterize hidden structures in the fused residuals through independent components (latent variables) as obtained through the demixing matrix. A significant change in the energy content of latent variables, detected through automated control limits, indicates an anomaly. Suppression of possible noise content in residuals—to decrease the likelihood of false alarms—is achieved by performing the residual analysis solely on the dominant parts of the demixing matrix. Our approach could detect anomalies in the process which caused bad quality chips (with the occurrence of malfunctions) with negligible delay based on the process data recorded by multiple sensors in two production phases: injection molding and bonding, which are independently carried out with completely different process parameter settings and on different machines (hence, can be seen as two distinct use cases). Our approach furthermore i.) produced lower false alarm rates than several related and well-known state-of-the-art methods for (unsupervised) anomaly detection, and ii.) also caused much lower parametrization efforts (in fact, none at all). Both aspects are essential for the useability of an anomaly detection approach

Autonomous supervision and optimization of product quality in a multi-stage manufacturing process based on self-adaptive prediction models.

In modern manufacturing facilities, there are basically two essential phases for assuring high production quality with low (or even zero) defects and waste in order to save costs for companies. The first phase concerns the early recognition of potentially arising problems in product quality, the second phase concerns proper reactions upon the recognition of such problems. In this paper, we address a holistic approach for handling both issues consecutively within a predictive maintenance framework at an on-line production system. Thereby, we address multi-stage functionality based on (i) data-driven forecast models for (measure-able) product quality criteria (QCs) at a latter stage, which are established and executed through process values (and their time series trends) recorded at an early stage of production (describing its progress), and (ii) process optimization cycles whose outputs are suggestions for proper reactions at an earlier stage in the case of forecasted downtrends or exceeds of allowed boundaries in product quality. The data-driven forecast models are established through a high-dimensional batch time-series modeling problem. In this, we employ a non-linear version of PLSR (partial least squares regression) by coupling PLS with generalized Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy systems (termed as PLS-fuzzy). The models are able to self-adapt over time based on recursive parameters adaptation and rule evolution functionalities. Two concepts for increased flexibility during model updates are proposed, (i) a dynamic outweighing strategy of older samples with an adaptive update of the forgetting factor (steering forgetting intensity) and (ii) an incremental update of the latent variable space spanned by the directions (loading vectors) achieved through PLS; the whole model update approach is termed as SAFM-IF (self-adaptive forecast models with increased flexibility). Process optimization is achieved through multi-objective optimization using evolutionary techniques, where the (trained and updated) forecast models serve as surrogate models to guide the optimization process to Pareto fronts (containing solution candidates) with high quality. A new influence analysis between process values and QCs is suggested based on the PLS-fuzzy forecast models in order to reduce the dimensionality of the optimization space and thus to guarantee high(er) quality of solutions within a reasonable amount of time (→ better usage in on-line mode). The methodologies have been comprehensively evaluated on real on-line process data from a (micro-fluidic) chip production system, where the early stage comprises the injection molding process and the latter stage the bonding process. The results show remarkable performance in terms of low prediction errors of the PLS-fuzzy forecast models (showing mostly lower errors than achieved by other model architectures) as well as in terms of Pareto fronts with individuals (solutions) whose fitness was close to the optimal values of three most important target QCs (being used for supervision): flatness, void events and RMSEs of the chips. Suggestions could thus be provided to experts/operators how to best change process values and associated machining parameters at the injection molding process in order to achieve significantly higher product quality for the final chips at the end of the bonding process

Self-adaptive evolving forecast models with incremental PLS space updating for on-line prediction of micro-fluidic chip quality

An important predictive maintenance task in modern production systems is to predict the quality of products in order to be able to intervene at an early stage to avoid faults and waste. Here, we address the prediction of the most important quality criteria in micro-fluidics chips: the flatness and critical size of the chips (in the form of RMSE values) and several transmission characteristics. Due to semi-manual inspection, these quality criteria are typically measured only intermittently. This leads to a high-dimensional batch process modeling problem with the goal of predicting chip quality based on the trends in these process values (time series). We apply time-series based transformation for dimension reduction to the lagged time-series space using of partial least squares (PLS), and combine this with a generalized form of Takagi–Sugeno(TS) fuzzy systems to obtain a non-linear PLS forecast model (termed as PLS-fuzzy). The rule consequent functions are robustly estimated by a weighted regularization scheme based on the idea of the elastic net approach. To address particular system dynamics over time, we propose dynamic updating of the non-linear PLS-fuzzy models using new on-line time-series data, with the options 1.) adapt and evolve the rule base on the fly, 2.) smoothly down-weight older samples to increase flexibility of the fuzzy models, and 3.) update the PLS space by incrementally adapting the loading vectors, where processing is achieved in a single-pass stream mining manner. We call our method IPLS-GEFS (incremental PLS combined with generalized evolving fuzzy systems). We applied our predictive modeling approach to data from on-line microfluidic chip production over a time period of about 6 months (July to December 2016). The results show that there is significant non-linearity in the predictive modeling problem, as the non-linear PLS-fuzzy modeling approach significantly outperformed classical PLS for most of the targets (quality criteria). Furthermore, it is important to update the models on the fly with incremental updating of the PLS space and/or with down-weighting older samples, as this significantly decreased the accumulated error trends of the prediction models compared to conventional updating. Reliable predictions of flatness quality (with around 10% error) and of RMSE values and transmissions (with around 15% errors) can be achieved with prediction horizons of up to 4 to 5 h into the future