Abstract

The world has entered a state of unprecedented access to machine intelligence algorithms, where the ease of deployment has created a scenario where nearly every facet of life and industry has been affected by AI. Especially within industry, where the options for enacting AI systems are wide and varied, the choice of which system will work best for a given application can be daunting. Understanding when, where, and why to apply a particular algorithm can provide competitive advantage on effectiveness as well as greater trust and justification when using the algorithms’ outputs. This paper examines multistage manufacturing processes, where system complexity can greatly influence the burden of creating custom tailored monitoring solutions. Such barriers have encouraged many manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SME) to look towards generic ‘black box’ commercial software solutions, although they may lack the sufficient expertise to objectively determine which product best meets their requirements. Some of the considerations faced by SMEs are identifying tools that can successfully be deployed alongside a potential lack of sensor coverage and/or the desire for rapid system reconfiguration to accommodate smaller custom batch production sizes. In these environments, detailed analytics-based solutions are often not feasible for production equipment monitoring. This paper provides a procedure for assessing the suitability of various tools or algorithms used to evaluate production process performance based on product quality output. This paper also presents a preliminary comparative example study of several algorithms to demonstrate this process and evaluate the selected algorithms.

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