Lean Manufacturing Soft Sensors for Automotive Industries

Lean and flexible manufacturing is a matter of necessity for the automotive industries today. Rising consumer expectations, higher raw material and processing costs, and dynamic market conditions are driving the auto sector to become smarter and agile. This paper presents a machine learning-based soft sensor approach for identification and prediction of lean manufacturing (LM) levels of auto industries based on their performances over multifarious flexibilities such as volume flexibility, routing flexibility, product flexibility, labour flexibility, machine flexibility, and material handling. This study was based on a database of lean manufacturing and associated flexibilities collected from 46 auto component enterprises located in the Pune region of Maharashtra State, India. As many as 29 different machine learning models belonging to seven architectures were explored to develop lean manufacturing soft sensors. These soft sensors were trained to classify the auto firms into high, medium or low levels of lean manufacturing based on their manufacturing flexibilities. The seven machine learning architectures included Decision Trees, Discriminants, Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbour (KNN), Ensembles, and Neural Networks (NN). The performances of all models were compared on the basis of their respective training, validation, testing accuracies, and computation timespans. Primary results indicate that the neural network architectures provided the best lean manufacturing predictions, followed by Trees, SVM, Ensembles, KNN, Naive Bayes, and Discriminants. The trilayered neural network architecture attained the highest testing prediction accuracy of 80%. The fine, medium, and coarse trees attained the testing accuracy of 60%, as did the quadratic and cubic SVMs, the wide and narrow neural networks, and the ensemble RUSBoosted trees. Remaining models obtained inferior testing accuracies. The best performing model was further analysed by scatter plots of predicted LM classes versus flexibilities, validation and testing confusion matrices, receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves, and the parallel coordinate plot for identifying manufacturing flexibility trends for the predicted LM levels. Thus, machine learning models can be used to create effective soft sensors that can predict the level of lean manufacturing of an enterprise based on the levels of its manufacturing flexibilities.