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Procedia CIRP 72 (2018) 219–224
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51st CIRP Conference on Manufacturing Systems

Lean Data in Manufacturing Systems: Using Artificial Intelligence for

Decentralized Data Reduction and Information Extraction
Thomas Küfnera*, Thomas H.-J. Uhlemanna, Bastian Zieglerb
a
Fraunhofer Project Group Process Innovation at the Chair of Manufacturing and Remanufacturing Technology, Universitätsstr. 9, 95447 Bayreuth, Germany
b
University of Bayreuth, Chair of Manufacturing and Remanufacturing Technology, Universitätsstr. 30, 95447 Bayreuth, Germany
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +49-921-78516-327; fax: +49-921-78516-105. E-mail address: thomas.kuefner@uni-bayreuth.de

Abstract

In the course of digitization, a drastically increased amount of acquired data in production systems can be observed. Nevertheless, only a minor
part of the acquired data is practically used for near real-time analysis and optimization within production systems. This paper introduces a
concept for the realization of a decentralized data analysis integration. Therefore, an analysis system using artificial neural networks is
conducted at the measurement point in the main supply of a production plant, to classify different operating states. The classification accuracy
in all evaluation models is at least 99.82% and proves that it is capable to recognize the operating states of a production machinery reliably. The
significantly, without loss of information, reduced amount of data is handed over to a superordinate instance of the production system for
further use of data.

© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 51st CIRP Conference on Manufacturing Systems.

Keywords: Edge analytics; Neural networks; Digitization; Artificial intelligence in manufacturing; Smart manufacturing;

1. Introduction using embedded systems. The analysis of measurement

Against the background of digitization, the amount of data
increases dramatically. While in 2016 the volume of annually
generated digital data was about 16.1 zettabytes, the volume
in 2025 is estimated at 163 zettabytes [1]. The exponential
growth promises further increase in the following years [1].
As digitization moves into production, the amount of data that
informs about production processes and products also expands
[2]. In the field of production and manufacturing, the data
often provides valuable information about production
processes or machine anomalies and enables companies to
make production facilities more transparent or resource-
efficient. As a current driver, predictive maintenance can be
mentioned, which ensures an improved production planning,
longer running times and higher availability of machines [3].
However, in many cases the data is not considered at all, since
the analysis is too time-consuming and expensive or there´s a
lack of analysis understanding in many companies. Therefore,
one approach is the decentralized data analysis in the plant
signals is performed on site and reduces data volumes so that
only relevant information is delivered to the user. This “Lean
Data” approach avoids subsequent data mining and the
storage of large amounts of data. In addition, the data traffic
coming from the machines is drastically reduced and the user
needs less background knowledge for analysis.
This paper presents a study for a decentralized analysis
model for classifying operating states in production plants
using artificial neural networks (ANN) on embedded systems.
The main objective is the development and evaluation of an
ANN, which is capable to recognize the operating states of a
production system based on current measurements in the
machines main supply. Using the current as an information
base is possible in almost every technical machinery and is
more cost-effective compared to other methods already being
used to recognize operating states by ANN. Therefore, the
motivation for this study are the new possibilities for
optimizing the production system and increasing its resource

2212-8271 © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 51st CIRP Conference on Manufacturing Systems.
10.1016/j.procir.2018.03.125
220 Thomas Küfner et al. / Procedia CIRP 72 (2018) 219–224
efficiency, which are enabled by the automated recognition of
operating states by using current profiles.
For this purpose, six defined operating states of a modified
production machinery and their current profiles were
measured. The measurement data is transferred to a multilayer
perceptron (MLP), a type of ANN, which is suitable to
classify operating states. The classification capability of the
MLP is proofed by various evaluation models, which differ in
the number of transferred machinery data. The prediction
accuracy in all evaluation models is at least 99.82% and
proves that the ANN is capable to recognize the operating
states of a production machinery reliably. The developed
ANN can be used for detecting production faults and
machinery wear automatically.
2. Related Work
Since the beginning of the 1990s, the use of ANN in
production plants has been discussed and partially
implemented. In 1997, Heuer identified three main areas of
application of ANN in production plants, which are still valid
today. He summed it up under the headings "diagnosis and
prognosis", "optimization" and "measurement, control and
regulation" [4].
Due to digitalization, the amount of data available in
production plants is increasing today. Given, that data is a
prerequisite for the use of machine learning, it is likely that the
importance of machine learning and ANN in production will
also increase and go beyond a primary monitoring of industrial
processes.
As an example of optimization of the factory layout,
Tsadiras et al. developed an ANN, which should efficiently
solve the buffer allocation problem that frequently occurs in
production plants. The goal of the ANN is to achieve the
optimum between maximizing the flow, minimizing the
number of buffers, maximizing profit and minimizing the
average work-in-process. The optimization of this is extremely
time consuming without the use of machine learning,
especially for large production lines with many workstations
and buffers. The trained ANN of Tsadiras et al. provides
layout designers with suggestions for solving this problem on
production lines with up to 180 workstations and 220 buffers
[6].
A frequent use case in diagnosis and prognosis is quality
assurance. Fritzsche describes how ANN can be used in body
construction with dynamically adjustable body-building
devices. According to him, ANNs are suitable for mapping
complex relationships between quality protocols and control
measures of the adjustable body-building devices and to
generate their own instructions for setting the device after a
learning phase [7, 8].
Another use case in the sector diagnosis and prognosis is
the condition monitoring of tools. In [9] a trained competitive
ANN is used, to monitor the condition of the tool flank wear
by classifying the tool into one of three states: initial wear,
medium wear and severe wear. The proposed method is tested
by the audible sound signals of a turning machine and
performs tool wear classification with 80% of accuracy [9].
An example for monitoring a production plant is the
learning process developed by Reuter and Bohlmann. In order
to detect possible errors in the production operation quickly
and to avoid downtimes due to maintenance work, the data of
various sensors of a production plant are preprocessed at first.
Subsequently, they are evaluated and operating states are
derived. A downstream MLP reads the activity structure and
derives predictions about the future plant behavior, which can
detect possible defects or wear of machine parts. The operator
is notified of the system status via an user interface. The
process was tested over several months during operation and
could reduce the downtime and maintenance times according
to Reuter and Bohlmann [10].
The use of machine learning has been tested in some areas
of production. ANN are used primarily in layout planning and
machine control, as well as simulation models for parameter
determination and optimization. With regard to the use of
ANN for the classification of operating states based on current
profiles, little knowledge is known so far. The ANN of this
study is to be placed within the scope of the “diagnosis and
prognosis”, since its focus lies on the classification of different
current profiles. If, based on this, future anomalies can be
detected and processes can be controlled, it would at the same
time also be assigned to the area of "measurement, control and
regulation".
3. Methodology
3.1. Description of the experimental setup
Figure 1 shows the electrical schematic of the modified
machinery setup. With the setup, different operating states of a
real production plant can be simulated and measured under
defined conditions.
generator
M4
~
K1 K4 motor 1
L1
L2 M1
L3 ~
N
electrical
motor 2 consumer
K5
M2
~
inverter
K2 K3 K6 motor 3
~ M3
~ ~
Fig. 1. Simple schematic of the experimental setup,
consisting of four three-phase asynchronous machines and
an inverter
 Thomas Küfner et al. / Procedia CIRP 72 (2018) 219–224 221

The setup consists of four three-phase asynchronous 25

machines, from which one is used as generator. The three motor 1 (OS1)
motor 2 (OS2)
motors can optionally be driven by an inverter. Simultaneous
20 motor 3 (OS3)
motor operation is not possible. The relevant characteristics of

eactiv powerin kW
the motors are shown in table 1.
15
Table 1. Characteristics of the three motors
motor one motor two motor three
10
nominal current [A] 3.11 5.6 3.0
nominal power [kW] 1.5 3.0 1.5
5
nominal rotation speed [min-1] 2865 2920 2910
power factor [-] 0.85 0.88 0.86
efficiency [%] 81.3 87.3 84.2 0
1 2 13
efficiency class IE2 IE3 IE3
time in s

The measurement of the electrical currents of the system
was carried out in the main supply line. For the present case,
only the current in phase conductor L2 was considered. The
signals are acquired with a sampling rate of 20 kS/s. From
this, 50 rms-current-values are calculated for each second.
Each measuring sequence lasts exactly 14 seconds and
therefore delivers 700 rms-current-values. The sequences are
later used to train the analysis model or to classify the
operating states afterwards. For each operating state, 250
individual measurements were recorded. These labeled
records serve as training and evaluation data for the ANN. In
this approach, six different operating states (OS), shown in
Fig. 2. Active power of the three motors (OS1, OS2 and OS3)
Motor one and motor three have a similar behavior during
start and operation, only the amplitude is different. During the
250 measurements of each OS, a temperature change of the
motors can be observed. Therefore, after every tenth current
measurement the surface temperature of the motor body is
recorded to monitor the temperature influence on the training
data. The different temperature changes are illustrated in
figure 3.
temperaturein °C

table 2 are considered to train and evaluate the model. 40

Table 2. Considered operating states

operating state (OS) electrical machine electrical consumer [W] 30
motor 1 (OS1)
OS1 motor one 0 motor 2 (OS2)
OS2 motor two 0 20
motor 3 (OS3)

OS3 motor three 0 0 50 100 150 200 250

OS4 motor one 250 number of measurements
OS5 motor two 250
Fig. 3. Temperature change during the 250 current measurements
OS6 motor three 250
The rise of the temperature is similar at every motor body
Each operating state corresponds to a measuring sequence and stagnates after about 150 measurements at different end-
of 14 seconds. The electrical consumer (resistance) in OS4, temperatures. With the changing temperature, the current
OS5 and OS6 is switched on after seven seconds. The first consumption of the motors also alternates. Figure 4 shows this
and the last seconds serve to capture the entire waveform of behavior of motor three. It should be noted in this context that
an OS. The motors actually operate approximately twelve the current profile of the heated motor three is very similar to
seconds in each OS. Figure 2 shows the active power of OS1, the profile of the cold motor one. This fact makes it nearly
OS2 and OS3. impossible to separate these OS manually.
222 Thomas Küfner et al. / Procedia CIRP 72 (2018) 219–224

30
to the OS. Each record therefore consists of one label and 700
motor 3 (OS3) - 1. measurement
motor 3 (OS3) - 250. measurement
measured values and serves as training data for the ANN. The
25 MLP of this paper bases on the sequential model of Keras
[17]. Ten evaluation models were created, which differ in
20 terms of the number of training and test data records
15 transferred, the parameter settings of the MLP and the number
in A

of operating states transferred. Fig ure 6 illustrates th e models

eff

of the ten MLP, designed in this work.

I2_

10
y
x1 OS1
5

x2
0
1 2 13 y
time in s
x 3
. . OS2
. .

. . . .
Fig. 4. Comparison between the current profiles of the first and the 250th . .

measurement of motor three . .

The current profiles of OS1 and OS4 in figure 5 illustrate x y

701 OS6
the difference between the two scenarios of the operating
states. The profiles during the start of the motor are similar in input hidden hidden output
layer layer one layer two layer
both scenarios. A difference appears after seven seconds when
the electrical consumer is switched on at OS4.
Fig. 6. Visualization of the MLP model

motor 1 (OS4) For each measurement, a 701-dimensional vector is passed

motor 1 (OS1) to the MLP. The input layer must therefore comprise at least
20 701 neurons. The two hidden layers have 500 (layer one) and
150 neurons (layer two). The number of output neurons
equals the number of OS.
I 2 eff in A

Since the best classifications were obtained using ELU

10
(exponential linear units) in the hidden layers, this rectifier is
chosen as the activation function in the first three layers. For

the output layer softmax-function is used as the activation

function.

3.3. Evaluation of the analysis model

0
5 10
time in s
Fig. 5. Comparison between OS1 and OS4 of motor one
3.2. Description of the analysis model
A basic requirement of the model is to reliably classify the
current profiles of a production plant by an ANN. Reliability
means, that the ANN assigns at least 95% of the transferred
power profiles to the correct OS. In image recognition, the
ImageNet database, consisting of more than 1.2 million
images of various classes, has achieved classification
accuracy of up to 97% [11, 12, and 13]. In speech recognition
as well, sentences are recognized with up to 96% accuracy,
depending on the framework conditions [14, 15, and 16].
First step of the analysis model is the data preparation. For
this purpose, a label was introduced whose numbering refers
In order to have reliable outcome about the learning
success, five ANN with identical parameter settings were
created for each model. The five independently trained ANN
were tested on the same samples. The key figures explained
below were then averaged over the five trained ANN.
To evaluate and compare the models, the two following
parameters were defined. The detection rate is the number,
which assigns the input data to a certain OS with a
probability. Ideally, the detection rate is therefore 100%. The
average detection rate is the mean value of the detection rates
of all test samples for five trained ANN of one model. In
addition to the detection rate, the classification accuracy is
another important performance feature of ANN [18]. It
describes what proportion of the test samples was assigned to
the actual OS.
Table 3 contains the relevant parameters and information
about the training and test samples of MLP 6 to 10. Since
MLP 1 to 5 are only used to classify OS1 to OS3, these
 Thomas Küfner et al. / Procedia CIRP 72 (2018) 219–224 223

models are not mentioned here. In addition to the test samples, The results allow further progress in predictive
which were completely unknown to the models during maintenance. The change in a current profile of a production
training, about 20% of the training data was used for plant can be an indicator of the wear of components in the
validation. production or indicate production errors. If training data is
transferred which results during such a fault or defect, it
Table 3. Characteristics of MLP 6 to 10 would also be possible to detect erroneous operating states
training samples test samples parameters after the training. Further procedure therefore includes an
No. batch extension of the operating states as well as a reduction of the
total per OS total per OS epochs iterations
size training samples with an equivalent classification accuracy. In
6 960 160 300 50 75 96 750 addition, it will be examined to what extent the models can be
7 480 80 300 50 150 96 750 used in embedded systems in order to perform the analysis
decentral in the production plant.
8 300 50 300 50 250 100 750
9 96 16 1200 200 1000 96 1000 Lean Data Module
database
10 66 11 300 50 1000 66 1000
current- embedded

...
MCU
Table 4 shows the results of MLP 6 to 10. Although the profiles UART computer ethernet
number of training data was gradually reduced from MLP 6 to
MLP 10, the accuracy of the models did not decrease. Only data acquisition machine learning data storage,
the parameters like training epochs and iterations has been and based postprocessing
adjusted. At the same time, more test data was available, preprocessing main processing and visualisatio
resulting in higher reliability of the results (MLP 9). At MLP
10, eleven training samples for each OS were necessary, to Fig. 7. Lean Data Module for decentralized information extraction
reach a classification accuracy of 99.93%. In other words, out
of totally 1500 samples, only one prediction was wrong. This Therefore, a hardware concept, illustrated in figure 7 is
is a promising result regarding to the context of monitoring used. It can be installed directly into the three-phase main
production facilities where only a few training samples are supply of production plants. The microcontroller (MCU)
present. samples the current profiles at 10 kS/s and performs a feature
extraction for data volume reduction. Afterwards, models,
Table 4. Results of MLP 6 to 10 introduced in this paper make the classification on the
No. average detection rate [%] classification accuracy [%] embedded system and deliver the information to the database,
6 99.77 99.93 were workers can use it for further purposes.
7 99.86 100.00
Acknowledgements
8 99.91 100.00
9 99.68 99.82 The presented research work is partially financed by the
10 99.81 99.93 European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the
Oberfrankenstiftung as supporters of the project Oberfranken
4. Conclusion and outlook 4.0. The authors are responsible for the contents of this
publication.
In this paper, it was examined and evaluated whether a
reliable detection of operating states based on the current
profiles of production plants is possible. Therefore, ten
multilayer perceptron models with several parameter settings
were developed and tested with real machine data. For all
evaluation models, an average detection rate of between
99.68% and 99.99% and a classification accuracy of between
99.82% and 100% were achieved. The values are very close to
the optimum of 100% and prove that the models are suitable
for a reliable classification of the operating states in
production plants. In addition, it has been proved that a small
two-digit number of training samples for each operating state
already suffices for the reliable classification in the present
application case, which makes the models particularly
interesting for use in embedded systems.
224 Thomas Küfner et al. / Procedia CIRP 72 (2018) 219–224

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