Prediction of Failure Categories in Plastic Extrusion Process with Deep Learning

Abstract

Today’s manufacturing vision necessitates extracting insights from the data collected in real-time from manufacturing processes. Predicting failures with the predictive analysis of the collected process data and preventing these failures by taking necessary actions before they occur is a key factor in ensuring quality at the desired level, increasing productivity, and reducing costs in production systems. In the literature on predictive analysis of process data, machine learning and deep learning methods have attracted considerable attention, especially in recent years. This study has addressed a multi-class failure classification problem in the plastic extrusion process with a real case study. Classification models have been developed based on Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) as a deep learning method and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Logistic Regression (LR) as machine learning methods to predict the failure categories. In the case study, real data taken from the extrusion process of one of the leading insulation companies operated in Izmir has been used. The final dataset includes actual measurements of seven parameters related to temperature and pressure and failure categories as the target variable. Three failure categories have been identified to define Category 0 (No failure), Category 1 (Filter change), and Category 2 (Feeding failures) states, and coded as 0,1 and 2 in the models, respectively. LSTM, MLP, and LR’s performance to predict the failure categories have been evaluated and compared based on accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 Score measures. LSTM is the highest performing among the three methods, with 100% prediction accuracy for each failure category. On the other hand, LR and MLP have achieved considerable and close results except for Category 1.