A task-oriented deep learning framework based on target-related transformer network for industrial quality prediction applications

Executing various production tasks is critical to the safe operation and efficient production of industrial processes. As one of them, the detection task of key quality variables directly affects the operation optimization and decision-making of industrial processes, but it is severely limited by the harsh environment and detection instruments. Therefore, the real-time prediction task of key quality variables becomes the basis for optimal control of industrial processes. To address this issue, this paper proposes a task-oriented deep learning framework based on a target-related transformer (TR-Former) network for industrial quality prediction tasks. Specifically, a new target-related self-attention (TR-SA) mechanism is developed to guide feature learning by adding attention scores between task-related target variables and other variables. As a result, the learned features in this instance will be guaranteed to be relevant to the target variable and useful for the quality prediction task. Moreover, the long-range dynamics of industrial process data can also be captured, which can further improve the prediction performance of the model. Finally, extensive experiments were conducted on two industrial processes to validate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of quality prediction tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed TR-Former method exhibits an improvement ranging from 3% to 13% in the mean absolute error indicator compared to the traditional transformer and other state-of-the-art methods.