Hierarchical RNN-based framework for throughput prediction in automotive production systems

Throughput analysis plays an important role in the operations and management of automotive manufacturing. Predicting how the system throughput changes over time helps the plant managers to make timely operational decisions to meet the daily production requirement. In today’s automotive production systems, the availability of sensing data reflecting process variables and machine status across the plant floor raises new opportunities for improving the throughput prediction accuracy. However, challenges exist in extracting the most important features from the high-dimensional data and capturing the complicated time-vary interdependency among different assets in the system. To overcome such challenges, in this paper we propose a hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based framework that is composed of clustering, dimension reduction and feature selection, regression, and prediction pruning/adjustment. In addition to predicting end-of-line throughput, our framework then identifies the associations for low throughput to facilitate downtime prevention and maintenance decision-making. The proposed framework is applied to an automotive production system, and its effectiveness is demonstrated by comparison with conventional methods.