The evolution of industry has enabled the integration of physical and digital systems, facilitating the collection of extensive data on manufacturing processes. This integration provides a reliable solution for improving process quality and managing equipment health. However, data collected from real manufacturing processes often exhibit challenging properties, such as severe class imbalance, high rates of missing values, and noisy features, which hinder effective machine learning implementation. In this study, a rare class prediction approach is developed for in situ data collected from a smart semiconductor manufacturing process. The primary objective is to build a model that addresses issues of noise and class imbalance, enhancing class separation. The developed approach demonstrated promising results compared to existing literature, which would allow the prediction of new observations that could give insights into future maintenance plans and production quality. The model was evaluated using various performance metrics, with ROC curves showing an AUC of 0.95, a precision of 0.66, and a recall of 0.96

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in the manufacturing of electric vehicles is the process of identifying fault causes. Traditionally, the RCA is conducted manually, relying on process expert knowledge. Meanwhile, sensor networks collect significant amounts of data in the manufacturing process. Using this data for RCA makes it more efficient. However, purely data-driven methods like Causal Bayesian Networks have problems scaling to large-scale, real-world manufacturing processes due to the vast amount of potential cause-effect relationships (CERs). Furthermore, purely data-driven methods have the potential to leave out already known CERs or to learn spurious CERs. The paper contributes by proposing an interactive and intelligent RCA tool that combines expert knowledge of an electric vehicle manufacturing process and a data-driven machine learning method. It uses reasoning over a large-scale Knowledge Graph of the manufacturing process while learning a Causal Bayesian Network. In addition, an Interactive User Interface enables a process expert to give feedback to the root cause graph by adding and removing information to the Knowledge Graph. The interactive and intelligent RCA tool reduces the learning time of the Causal Bayesian Network while decreasing the number of spurious CERs. Thus, the interactive and intelligent RCA tool closes the feedback loop between expert and machine learning method.

Scenario-based testing is a promising approach to solve the challenge of proving the safe behavior of vehicles equipped with automated driving systems. Since an infinite number of concrete scenarios can theoretically occur in real-world road traffic, the extraction of scenarios relevant in terms of the safety-related behavior of these systems is a key aspect for their successful verification and validation. Therefore, a method for extracting multimodal urban traffic scenarios from naturalistic road traffic data in an unsupervised manner, minimizing the amount of (potentially biased) prior expert knowledge, is proposed. Rather than an (elaborate) rule-based assignment by extracting concrete scenarios into predefined functional scenarios, the presented method deploys an unsupervised machine learning pipeline. The approach allows exploring the unknown nature of the data and their interpretation as test scenarios that experts could not have anticipated. The method is evaluated for naturalistic road traffic data at urban intersections from the inD and the Silicon Valley Intersections datasets. For this purpose, it is analyzed with which clustering approach (K-Means, hierarchical clustering, and DBSCAN) the scenario extraction method performs best (referring to an elaborate rule-based implementation). Subsequently, using hierarchical clustering the results show both a jump in overall accuracy of around 20% when moving from 4 to 5 clusters and a saturation effect starting at 41 clusters with an overall accuracy of 84%. These observations can be a valuable contribution in the context of the trade-off between the number of functional scenarios (i.e., clustering accuracy) and testing effort. Possible reasons for the observed accuracy variations of different clusters, each with a fixed total number of given clusters, are discussed.

Founded in 1991, India-headquartered HCL Technologies is a global technology company that helps enterprises reimagine their businesses for the digital age. The company specializes in key areas, including digital, IoT, cloud, automation, cybersecurity, and analytics, amongst others. With the company increasingly having a presence in the RegTech space, how does it see the sector changing? How is RegTech changing compliance? According to Daryl Wilkinson – Senior Executive, Strategic Initiatives, Financial Services UK&I at HCL Technologies, "I think you can look at this through two lenses. First, there appears to be a consensus that the global RegTech market is expected to achieve $30bn by 2027 – so that alone is changing the compliance market –new investment is disrupting incumbent models and is changing the way regulators engage with businesses. The second lens is cost; financial services rely heavily on legacy technology – RegTech's nature is to find that niche to solve those problems at a much lower cost than the banks and insurers might otherwise do themselves."

We consider human activity recognition (HAR) from wearable sensor data in manual-work processes, like warehouse order-picking. Such structured domains can often be partitioned into distinct process steps, e.g., packaging or transporting. Each process step can have a different prior distribution over activity classes, e.g., standing or walking, and different system dynamics. Here, we show how such context information can be integrated systematically into a deep neural network-based HAR system. Specifically, we propose a hybrid architecture that combines a deep neural network-that estimates high-level movement descriptors, attributes, from the raw-sensor data-and a shallow classifier, which predicts activity classes from the estimated attributes and (optional) context information, like the currently executed process step. We empirically show that our proposed architecture increases HAR performance, compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we show that HAR performance can be further increased when information about process steps is incorporated, even when that information is only partially correct.

This study proposes an innovative explainable process prediction solution to facilitate the data-driven decision making for process planning in manufacturing. After integrating the top-floor and shop-floor data obtained from various enterprise information systems especially from Manufacturing Execution Systems, a deep neural network was applied to predict the process outcomes. Since we aim to operationalize the delivered predictive insights by embedding them into decision making processes, it is essential to generate the relevant explanations for domain experts. To this end, two local post-hoc explanation approaches, Shapley Values and Individual Conditional Expectation (ICE) plots, are applied which are expected to enhance the decision-making capabilities by enabling experts to examine explanations from different perspectives. After assessing the predictive strength of the adopted deep neural networks with relevant binary classification evaluation measures, a discussion of the generated explanations is provided. Lastly, a brief discussion of ongoing activities in the scope of current emerging application and some aspects of future implementation plan concludes the study.

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.

In this paper, we propose DeepAlign, a novel approach to multi-perspective process anomaly correction, based on recurrent neural networks and bidirectional beam search. At the core of the DeepAlign algorithm are two recurrent neural networks trained to predict the next event. One is reading sequences of process executions from left to right, while the other is reading the sequences from right to left. By combining the predictive capabilities of both neural networks, we show that it is possible to calculate sequence alignments, which are used to detect and correct anomalies. DeepAlign utilizes the case-level and event-level attributes to closely model the decisions within a process. We evaluate the performance of our approach on an elaborate data corpus of 30 realistic synthetic event logs and compare it to three state-of-the-art conformance checking methods. DeepAlign produces better corrections than the rest of the field reaching an overall accuracy of 98.45% across all datasets, whereas the best comparable state-of-the-art method reaches 70.19%.