Manufacturing Line Ablation, an approach to perform reliable early prediction

Manufacturing and assembly lines have become more and more complex over the years. One reason for this complexity is multistage manufacturing, where faults in one stage may carry forward downstream in the production line. Our goal is to find the production stage where reliable fault prediction will already be possible. Our approach takes an holistic view over the complete manufacturing line and performs an ablation study on product-specific data. The outcome of our approach is the analysis of a given manufacturing line that results in locating manufacturing stages where reliable prediction of faulty products is possible. Our objective is to support the implementation of an operative decision support system that allows to decide when to perform early prediction in a manufacturing process.