A Zero-Shot Learning application in Deep Drawing process using Hyper-Process Model

TL;DR

This paper presents a Hyper-Process Model leveraging Zero-Shot Learning to rapidly generate process models for new product variants in deep drawing, reducing calibration time and enabling quick integration of new products.

Contribution

It formulates an industrial problem into a ZSL setting and defines a regression problem within this domain, demonstrating the approach with simulated deep drawing data.

Findings

Successfully generated process models for unseen tasks without data

Reduced calibration time for new product variants

Effective shape analysis for task similarity understanding

Abstract

One of the consequences of passing from mass production to mass customization paradigm in the nowadays industrialized world is the need to increase flexibility and responsiveness of manufacturing companies. The high-mix / low-volume production forces constant accommodations of unknown product variants, which ultimately leads to high periods of machine calibration. The difficulty related with machine calibration is that experience is required together with a set of experiments to meet the final product quality. Unfortunately, all possible combinations of machine parameters is so high that is difficult to build empirical knowledge. Due to this fact, normally trial and error approaches are taken making one-of-a-kind products not viable. Therefore, a Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) based approach called hyper-process model (HPM) to learn the relation among multiple tasks is used as a way to shorten the calibration phase. Assuming each product variant is a task to solve, first, a shape analysis on data to learn common modes of deformation between tasks is made, and secondly, a mapping between these modes and task descriptions is performed. Ultimately, the present work has two main contributions: 1) Formulation of an industrial problem into a ZSL setting where new process models can be generated for process optimization and 2) the definition of a regression problem in the domain of ZSL. For that purpose, a 2-d deep drawing simulated process was used based on data collected from the Abaqus simulator, where a significant number of process models were collected to test the effectiveness of the approach. The obtained results show that is possible to learn new tasks without any available data (both labeled and unlabeled) by leveraging information about already existing tasks, allowing to speed up the calibration phase and make a quicker integration of new products into manufacturing systems.