On the Problem of State Recognition in Injection Molding Based on Accelerometer Data Sets

Abstract

The last few decades have been characterised by a very active application of smart technologies in various fields of industry. This paper deals with industrial activities, such as injection molding, where it is required to monitor continuously the manufacturing process to identify both the effective running time and down-time periods. Supervised machine learning algorithms are developed to recognize automatically the periods of the injection molding machines. The former algorithm uses directly the features of the descriptive statistics, while the latter one utilizes a convolutional neural network. The automatic state recognition system is equipped with an 3D-accelerometer sensor whose datasets are used to train and verify the proposed algorithms. The novelty of our contribution is that accelerometer data-based machine learning models are used to distinguish producing and non-producing periods by means of recognition of key steps in an injection molding cycle. The first testing results show the approximate overall balanced accuracy of 72–92% that illustrates the large potential of the monitoring system with the accelerometer. According to the ANOVA test, there are no sufficient statistical differences between the comparative algorithms, but the results of the neural network exhibit higher variances of the defined accuracy metrics.