Machine Learning Methods for Product Quality Monitoring in Electric Resistance Welding

Elektrisches Widerstandsschweißen (Englisch: Electric Resistance Welding, ERW) ist eine Gruppe von vollautomatisierten Fertigungsprozessen, bei denen metallische Werkstoffe durch Wärme verbunden werden, die von elektrischem Strom und Widerstand erzeugt wird. Eine genaue Qualitätsüberwachung von ERW kann oft nur teilweise mit destruktiven Methoden durchgeführt werden. Es besteht ein großes industrielles und wirtschaftliches Potenzial, datengetriebene Ansätze für die Qualitätsüberwachung in ERW zu entwickeln, um die Wartungskosten zu senken und die Qualitätskontrolle zu verbessern. Datengetriebene Ansätze wie maschinelles Lernen (ML) haben aufgrund der enormen Menge verfügbarer Daten, die von Technologien der Industrie 4.0 bereitgestellt werden, viel Aufmerksamkeit auf sich gezogen. Datengetriebene Ansätze ermöglichen eine zerstörungsfreie, umfassende und präzise Qualitätsüberwachung, wenn eine bestimmte Menge präziser Daten verfügbar ist. Dies kann eine umfassende Online-Qualitätsüberwachung ermöglichen, die ansonsten mit herkömmlichen empirischen Methoden äußerst schwierig ist. Es gibt jedoch noch viele Herausforderungen bei der Adoption solcher Ansätze in der Fertigungsindustrie. Zu diesen Herausforderungen gehören: effiziente Datensammlung, die dasWissen von erforderlichen Datenmengen und relevanten Sensoren für erfolgreiches maschinelles Lernen verlangt; das anspruchsvolle Verstehen von komplexen Prozessen und facettenreichen Daten; eine geschickte Selektion geeigneter ML-Methoden und die Integration von Domänenwissen für die prädiktive Qualitätsüberwachung mit inhomogenen Datenstrukturen, usw. Bestehende ML-Lösungen für ERW liefern keine systematische Vorgehensweise für die Methodenauswahl. Jeder Prozess der ML-Entwicklung erfordert ein umfassendes Prozess- und Datenverständnis und ist auf ein bestimmtes Szenario zugeschnitten, das schwer zu verallgemeinern ist. Es existieren semantische Lösungen für das Prozess- und Datenverständnis und Datenmanagement. Diese betrachten die Datenanalyse als eine isolierte Phase. Sie liefern keine Systemlösungen für das Prozess- und Datenverständnis, die Datenaufbereitung und die ML-Verbesserung, die konfigurierbare und verallgemeinerbare Lösungen für maschinelles Lernen ermöglichen. Diese Arbeit versucht, die obengenannten Herausforderungen zu adressieren, indem ein Framework für maschinelles Lernen für ERW vorgeschlagen wird, und demonstriert fünf industrielle Anwendungsfälle, die das Framework anwenden und validieren. Das Framework überprüft die Fragen und Datenspezifitäten, schlägt eine simulationsunterstützte Datenerfassung vor und erörtert Methoden des maschinellen Lernens, die in zwei Gruppen unterteilt sind: Feature Engineering und Feature Learning. Das Framework basiert auf semantischen Technologien, die eine standardisierte Prozess- und Datenbeschreibung, eine Ontologie-bewusste Datenaufbereitung sowie halbautomatisierte und Nutzer-konfigurierbare ML-Lösungen ermöglichen. Diese Arbeit demonstriert außerdem die Übertragbarkeit des Frameworks auf einen hochpräzisen Laserprozess. Diese Arbeit ist ein Beginn des Wegs zur intelligenten Fertigung von ERW, der mit dem Trend der vierten industriellen Revolution korrespondiert

Real-Time Event Detection with Random Forests and Temporal Convolutional Networks for More Sustainable Petroleum Industry

The petroleum industry is crucial for modern society, but the production process is complex and risky. During the production, accidents or failures, resulting from undesired production events, can cause severe environmental and economic damage. Previous studies have investigated machine learning (ML) methods for undesired event detection. However, the prediction of event probability in real-time was insufficiently addressed, which is essential since it is important to undertake early intervention when an event is expected to happen. This paper proposes two ML approaches, random forests and temporal convolutional networks, to detect undesired events in real-time. Results show that our approaches can effectively classify event types and predict the probability of their appearance, addressing the challenges uncovered in previous studies and providing a more effective solution for failure event management during the production.Comment: Paper accepted at PRICAI 2023 AI-Impact Trac

Comparison of Machine Learning Approaches for Time-series-based Quality Monitoring of Resistance Spot Welding (RSW)

In automatic manufacturing, enormous amounts of data are generated every day. However, labeled production data useful for data analysis is difficult to acquire. Resistance spot welding (RSW), widely applied in automobile production, is a typical automatic manufacturing process with inhomogeneous data structures as well as statistical and systematic dynamics. In resistance spot welding, an electric current flows through electrodes and the materials in between. The materials are first heated and melted, then congeal, forming what is known as a weld nugget, joining the materials together. The nugget size is an important quality indicator, but can only be precisely obtained by using costly destructive methods. This paper strives to address the issue of the scarcity of labeled data by using simulation data generated with a verified finite element model. Physics-based simulation enables large amounts of labeled data to be generated with fewer limits on sensors and costs. Based on the simulation data, this paper explores and compares multiple machine learning methods, predicts the nugget size with a high degree of accuracy, and conducts an analysis of the influence of feature number and amount of training data on prediction accuracy

Towards Ontology Reshaping for KG Generation with User-in-the-Loop: Applied to Bosch Welding

Knowledge graphs (KG) are used in a wide range of applications. The automation of KG generation is very desired due to the data volume and variety in industries. One important approach of KG generation is to map the raw data to a given KG schema, namely a domain ontology, and construct the entities and properties according to the ontology. However, the automatic generation of such ontology is demanding and existing solutions are often not satisfactory. An important challenge is a trade-off between two principles of ontology engineering: knowledge-orientation and data-orientation. The former one prescribes that an ontology should model the general knowledge of a domain, while the latter one emphasises on reflecting the data specificities to ensure good usability. We address this challenge by our method of ontology reshaping, which automates the process of converting a given domain ontology to a smaller ontology that serves as the KG schema. The domain ontology can be designed to be knowledge-oriented and the KG schema covers the data specificities. In addition, our approach allows the option of including user preferences in the loop. We demonstrate our on-going research on ontology reshaping and present an evaluation using real industrial data, with promising results

Scaling Data Science Solutions with Semantics and Machine Learning: Bosch Case

Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies unlock unprecedented amount of data from factory production, posing big data challenges in volume and variety. In that context, distributed computing solutions such as cloud systems are leveraged to parallelise the data processing and reduce computation time. As the cloud systems become increasingly popular, there is increased demand that more users that were originally not cloud experts (such as data scientists, domain experts) deploy their solutions on the cloud systems. However, it is non-trivial to address both the high demand for cloud system users and the excessive time required to train them. To this end, we propose SemCloud, a semantics-enhanced cloud system, that couples cloud system with semantic technologies and machine learning. SemCloud relies on domain ontologies and mappings for data integration, and parallelises the semantic data integration and data analysis on distributed computing nodes. Furthermore, SemCloud adopts adaptive Datalog rules and machine learning for automated resource configuration, allowing non-cloud experts to use the cloud system. The system has been evaluated in industrial use case with millions of data, thousands of repeated runs, and domain users, showing promising results.Comment: Paper accepted at ISWC2023 In-Use trac

Literal-Aware Knowledge Graph Embedding for Welding Quality Monitoring: A Bosch Case

Recently there has been a series of studies in knowledge graph embedding (KGE), which attempts to learn the embeddings of the entities and relations as numerical vectors and mathematical mappings via machine learning (ML). However, there has been limited research that applies KGE for industrial problems in manufacturing. This paper investigates whether and to what extent KGE can be used for an important problem: quality monitoring for welding in manufacturing industry, which is an impactful process accounting for production of millions of cars annually. The work is in line with Bosch research of data-driven solutions that intends to replace the traditional way of destroying cars, which is extremely costly and produces waste. The paper tackles two very challenging questions simultaneously: how large the welding spot diameter is; and to which car body the welded spot belongs to. The problem setting is difficult for traditional ML because there exist a high number of car bodies that should be assigned as class labels. We formulate the problem as link prediction, and experimented popular KGE methods on real industry data, with consideration of literals. Our results reveal both limitations and promising aspects of adapted KGE methods.Comment: Paper accepted at ISWC2023 In-Use trac

Addressing the Scalability Bottleneck of Semantic Technologies at Bosch

At the heart of smart manufacturing is real-time semi-automatic decision-making. Such decisions are vital for optimizing production lines, e.g., reducing resource consumption, improving the quality of discrete manufacturing operations, and optimizing the actual products, e.g., optimizing the sampling rate for measuring product dimensions during production. Such decision-making relies on massive industrial data thus posing a real-time processing bottleneck

Machine learning aided phase retrieval algorithm for beam splitting with an LCoS-SLM

Liquid crystal on silicon phase-only spatial light modulators are widely used for the generation of multi-spot patterns. The phase distribution in the modulator plane, corresponding to the target multi-spot intensity distribution in the focal plane, is calculated by means of the so-called phase retrieval algorithms. Due to deviations of the real optical setup from the ideal model, these algorithms often do not achieve the desired power distribution accuracy within the multi-spot patterns. In this study, we present a novel method for generating high quality multi-spot patterns even in the presence of optical system disturbances. The standard Iterative Fourier Transform Algorithm is extended by means of machine learning methods combined with an open camera feedback loop. The machine learning algorithm is used to predict the mapping function between the desired and the measured multi-spot beam profiles. The problem of generation of multispot patterns is divided into three complexity levels. Due to distinct parameter structures, each of the complexity levels requires differing solution approaches, particularly differing machine learning algorithms. This relation is discussed in detail eventually providing a solution for the simplest case of beam splitter pattern generation. Solutions for more complex problems are also suggested. The approach is validated, whereby one machine learning method is successfully implemented and tested experimentally

SemML: Facilitating development of ML models for condition monitoring with semantics

Monitoring of the state, performance, quality of operations and other parameters of equipment and production processes, which is typically referred to as condition monitoring, is an important common practice in many industries including manufacturing, oil and gas, chemical and process industry. In the age of Industry 4.0, where the aim is a deep degree of production automation, unprecedented amounts of data are generated by equipment and processes, and this enables adoption of Machine Learning (ML) approaches for condition monitoring. Development of such ML models is challenging. On the one hand, it requires collaborative work of experts from different areas, including data scientists, engineers, process experts, and managers with asymmetric backgrounds. On the other hand, there is high variety and diversity of data relevant for condition monitoring. Both factors hampers ML modelling for condition monitoring. In this work, we address these challenges by empowering ML-based condition monitoring with semantic technologies. To this end we propose a software system SemML that allows to reuse and generalise ML pipelines for conditions monitoring by relying on semantics. In particular, SemML has several novel components and relies on ontologies and ontology templates for ML task negotiation and for data and ML feature annotation. SemML also allows to instantiate parametrised ML pipelines by semantic annotation of industrial data. With SemML, users do not need to dive into data and ML scripts when new datasets of a studied application scenario arrive. They only need to annotate data and then ML models will be constructed through the combination of semantic reasoning and ML modules. We demonstrate the benefits of SemML on a Bosch use-case of electric resistance welding with very promising results