The rapidly increasing demand and complexity of manufacturing process potentiates the usage of manufacturing data with the highest priority to achieve precise analyze and control, rather than using simplified physical models and human expertise. In the era of data-driven manufacturing, the explosion of data amount revolutionized how data is collected and analyzed. This paper overviews the advance of technologies developed for in-process manufacturing data collection and analysis. It can be concluded that groundbreaking sensoring technology to facilitate direct measurement is one important leading trend for advanced data collection, due to the complexity and uncertainty during indirect measurement. On the other hand, physical model-based data analysis contains inevitable simplifications and sometimes ill-posed solutions due to the limited capacity of describing complex manufacturing process. Machine learning, especially deep learning approach has great potential for making better decisions to automate the process when fed with abundant data, while trending data-driven manufacturing approaches succeeded by using limited data to achieve similar or even better decisions. And these trends can demonstrated be by analyzing some typical applications of manufacturing process.
The state prediction of key components in manufacturing systems tends to be risk-sensitive tasks, where prediction accuracy and stability are the two key indicators. The physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), which integrate the advantages of both data-driven models and physics models, are deemed as an effective approach and research trends for stable prediction; however, the potential advantages of PINN are limited for the situations with inaccurate physics models or noisy data, where the balancing of the weights of the data-driven model and physics model is very important for improving the performance of PINN, and it is also a challenge urgently to be addressed. This article proposed a kind of PINN with weighted losses (PNNN-WLs) by uncertainty evaluation for accurate and stable prediction of manufacturing systems, where a novel weight allocation strategy based on uncertainty evaluation by quantifying the variance of prediction errors is proposed, and an improved PINN framework is established for accurate and stable prediction. The proposed approach is verified with open datasets on tool wear prediction, and experimental results show that the prediction accuracy and stability could be obviously improved over existing methods.
1 April 2016 in Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing