Root Cause Analysis in Lithium-Ion Battery Production with FMEA-Based Large-Scale Bayesian Network

The production of lithium-ion battery cells is characterized by a high degree of complexity due to numerous cause-effect relationships between process characteristics. Knowledge about the multi-stage production is spread among several experts, rendering tasks as failure analysis challenging. In this paper, a new method is presented that includes expert knowledge acquisition in production ramp-up by combining Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) with a Bayesian Network. Special algorithms are presented that help detect and resolve inconsistencies between the expert-provided parameters which are bound to occur when collecting knowledge from several process experts. We show the effectiveness of this holistic method by building up a large scale, cross-process Bayesian Failure Network in lithium-ion battery production and its application for root cause analysis.