A Hybrid Data-Driven Approach for Forecasting the Characteristics of Production Disruptions and Interruptions

Manufacturing companies sometimes suffer from unexpected production disruptions/interruptions events (DIEs), affecting the production performance and cost. Since DIEs vary in type and cause, predicting the characteristics of their corresponding production downtimes is a challenging task. Although efforts have been devoted to forecast/prevent specific types of DIEs, such as machine-related events, it is still difficult to deal with the uncertainty caused by a combination of production DIEs of various types. Moreover, the absence of a realistic scenario generator incorporating DIEs has been a challenge in production scheduling under uncertainty. This study investigates the potential use of a hybrid data-driven approach in incorporating the uncertainties of a wide range of DIEs. In this approach, a random forest (RF) method and probability distributions are integrated to forecast the DIEs. The study was carried out based on the recorded DIEs in a Canadian company producing assembly parts for automotive industry. The performance of the proposed methodology for forecasting the production DIEs is evaluated by determining the predicted total downtime (TD) in percent of the expected processing time. The proposed hybrid model yields an overall accuracy of 92.82% in predicting the TD, compared to an overall accuracy of 75.64% when a single RF is used for prediction.