A generative neural network model for the quality prediction of work in progress products

One of the key challenges in manufacturing processes is improving the accuracy of quality monitoring and prediction. This paper proposes a generative neural network model for automatically predicting work-in-progress product quality. Our approach combines an unsupervised feature-extraction step with a supervised learning method. An autoencoding neural network is trained using raw manufacturing process data to extract rich information from production line recordings. Then, the extracted features are reformed as time-series and are fed into a multi-layer perceptron for predicting product quality. Finally, the outputs are decoded into a forecast quality measure. We evaluate the performance of the generative model on a case study from a powder metallurgy process. Our experimental results suggest that our method can precisely capture the defective products. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.