A sequential cross-product knowledge accumulation, extraction and transfer framework for machine learning-based production process modelling

Machine learning is a promising method to model production processes and predict product quality. It is challenging to accurately model complex systems due to data scarcity, as mass customisation leads to various high-variety low-volume products. This study conceptualised knowledge accumulation, extraction, and transfer (KAET) to exploit the knowledge embedded in similar entities to address data scarcity. A sequential cross-product KAET (SeqTrans) is proposed to conduct KAET, integrating data preparation and preprocessing, feature selection (FS), feature learning (FL), and transfer learning (TL). The FS and FL modules conduct knowledge extraction and help address various practical challenges such as changing operating conditions and unbalanced datasets. In this paper, sequential TL is introduced to production modelling to conduct knowledge transfer among multiple entities. The first case study of auxetic material performance prediction demonstrates the effectiveness of sequential TL. Compared with conventional TL, sequential TL can achieve the same test mean square errors with 300 fewer training examples when facing data scarcity. In the second case study, balancing anomaly detection models were constructed for two gas turbines in the same series using real-world production data. With SeqTrans, the F1-score of the anomaly detection model of the data-poor engine was improved from 0.769 to 0.909.