Mechanistic artificial intelligence (mechanistic-AI) for modeling, design, and control of advanced manufacturing processes: Current state and perspectives

Abstract

Today's manufacturing processes are pushed to their limits to generate products with ever-increasing quality at low costs. A prominent hurdle on this path arises from the multiscale, multiphysics, dynamic, and stochastic nature of many manufacturing systems, which motivated many innovations at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and manufacturing sciences. This study reviews recent advances in Mechanistic-AI, defined as a methodology that combines the raw mathematical power of AI methods with mechanism-driven principles and engineering insights. Mechanistic-AI solutions are systematically analyzed for three aspects of manufacturing processes, i.e., modeling, design, and control, with a focus on approaches that can improve data requirements, generalizability, explainability, and capability to handle challenging and heterogeneous manufacturing data. Additionally, we introduce a corpus of cutting-edge Mechanistic-AI methods that have shown to be very promising in other scientific fields but yet to be applied in manufacturing. Finally, gaps in the knowledge and under-explored research directions are identified, such as lack of incorporating manufacturing constraints into AI methods, lack of uncertainty analysis, and limited reproducibility and established benchmarks. This paper shows the immense potential of the Mechanistic-AI to address new problems in manufacturing systems and is expected to drive further advancements in manufacturing and related fields.