An adaptive machine learning methodology to determine manufacturing process parameters for each part

Abstract The identification of appropriate manufacturing process parameters typically relies on rule-based schemes, expertise, and domain knowledge of highly skilled workers. Usually, the parameter settings remain the same for each part in an individual production lot once an acceptable quality is reached. Each part, however, has slightly different properties and part-specific parameter settings have the opportunity to increase quality and reduce scrap. We propose a simple linear regression model to identify process parameters based on experimental data and extend that model with ideas from time series analysis to achieve highly-accurate, part-specific parameter settings in a real-world manufacturing use case. We show the usefulness of exploiting the (autocorrelated) structure of regression residuals to improve the predictive performance of regression models in manufacturing environments.