Towards transparent and data-driven fault detection in manufacturing: A case study on univariate, discrete time series

📅 2025-06-30
📈 Citations: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
To address the trade-off between poor adaptability of conventional methods and weak interpretability of data-driven models in manufacturing fault detection, this paper proposes an interpretable fault detection framework tailored to univariate discrete-time series from crimping processes. Methodologically, it integrates supervised multi-class classification, post-hoc Shapley value explanation, and domain-specific visualization to jointly deliver fault classification and human-readable decision rationale. Its key contribution lies in a human-centered explanation mapping mechanism, rigorously validated through quantitative perturbation analysis and expert evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate a classification accuracy of 95.9%, with explanations exhibiting both statistical relevance and operational readability. The framework significantly enhances the reliability, trustworthiness, and practical utility of industrial quality control systems.

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📝 Abstract
Ensuring consistent product quality in modern manufacturing is crucial, particularly in safety-critical applications. Conventional quality control approaches, reliant on manually defined thresholds and features, lack adaptability to the complexity and variability inherent in production data and necessitate extensive domain expertise. Conversely, data-driven methods, such as machine learning, demonstrate high detection performance but typically function as black-box models, thereby limiting their acceptance in industrial environments where interpretability is paramount. This paper introduces a methodology for industrial fault detection, which is both data-driven and transparent. The approach integrates a supervised machine learning model for multi-class fault classification, Shapley Additive Explanations for post-hoc interpretability, and a do-main-specific visualisation technique that maps model explanations to operator-interpretable features. Furthermore, the study proposes an evaluation methodology that assesses model explanations through quantitative perturbation analysis and evaluates visualisations by qualitative expert assessment. The approach was applied to the crimping process, a safety-critical joining technique, using a dataset of univariate, discrete time series. The system achieves a fault detection accuracy of 95.9 %, and both quantitative selectivity analysis and qualitative expert evaluations confirmed the relevance and inter-pretability of the generated explanations. This human-centric approach is designed to enhance trust and interpretability in data-driven fault detection, thereby contributing to applied system design in industrial quality control.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Ensuring product quality in safety-critical manufacturing applications
Overcoming black-box limitations in data-driven fault detection models
Enhancing interpretability of machine learning for industrial quality control
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Supervised machine learning for fault classification
Shapley Additive Explanations for interpretability
Domain-specific visualization for operator features
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