# Identifying Cause-and-Effect Relationships of Manufacturing Errors using Sequence-to-Sequence Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.02827 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02827/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Stabilizing Transformers for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06764/) (2019)
- [TadGAN: Time Series Anomaly Detection Using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07769/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Developing an AI-enabled IIoT platform -- Lessons learned from early use case validation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04515/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In car-body production the pre-formed sheet metal parts of the body are assembled on fully-automated production lines. The body passes through multiple stations in succession, and is processed according to the order requirements. The timely completion of orders depends on the individual station-based operations concluding within their scheduled cycle times. If an error occurs in one station, it can have a knock-on effect, resulting in delays on the downstream stations. To the best of our knowledge, there exist no methods for automatically distinguishing between source and knock-on errors in this setting, as well as establishing a causal relation between them. Utilizing real-time information about conditions collected by a production data acquisition system, we propose a novel vehicle manufacturing analysis system, which uses deep learning to establish a link between source and knock-on errors. We benchmark three sequence-to-sequence models, and introduce a novel composite time-weighted action metric for evaluating models in this context. We evaluate our framework on a real-world car production dataset recorded by Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles. Surprisingly we find that 71.68% of sequences contain either a source or knock-on error. With respect to seq2seq model training, we find that the Transformer demonstrates a better performance compared to LSTM and GRU in this domain, in particular when the prediction range with respect to the durations of future actions is increased.