A Review on Data-Driven Quality Prediction in the Production Process with Machine Learning for Industry 4.0

Abstract

The quality-control process in manufacturing must ensure the product is free of defects and performs according to the customer’s expectations. Maintaining the quality of a firm’s products at the highest level is very important for keeping an edge over the competition. To maintain and enhance the quality of their products, manufacturers invest a lot of resources in quality control and quality assurance. During the assembly line, parts will arrive at a constant interval for assembly. The quality criteria must first be met before the parts are sent to the assembly line where the parts and subparts are assembled to get the final product. Once the product has been assembled, it is again inspected and tested before it is delivered to the customer. Because manufacturers are mostly focused on visual quality inspection, there can be bottlenecks before and after assembly. The manufacturer may suffer a loss if the assembly line is slowed down by this bottleneck. To improve quality, state-of-the-art sensors are being used to replace visual inspections and machine learning is used to help determine which part will fail. Using machine learning techniques, a review of quality assessment in various production processes is presented, along with a summary of the four industrial revolutions that have occurred in manufacturing, highlighting the need to detect anomalies in assembly lines, the need to detect the features of the assembly line, the use of machine learning algorithms in manufacturing, the research challenges, the computing paradigms, and the use of state-of-the-art sensors in Industry 4.0.