Managing Disruptions in Production with Machine Learning

Abstract

Changing customer demands lead to increasing product varieties and decreasing delivery times, which in turn pose great challenges for production companies. Combined with high market volatility, they lead to increasingly complex and diverse production processes. Thus, the susceptibility to disruptions in manufacturing rises, turning the task of Production Planning and Control (PPC) into a complex, dynamic and multidimensional problem. Addressing PPC challenges such as disruption management in an efficient and timely manner requires a high level of manual human intervention. In times of digitization and Industry 4.0, companies strive to find ways to guide their workers in this process of disruption management or automate it to eliminate human intervention altogether. This paper presents one possible application of Machine Learning (ML) in disruption management on a real-life use case in mixed model continuous production, specifically in the final assembly. The aim is to ensure high-quality online decision support for PPC tasks. This paper will therefore discuss the use of ML to anticipate production disruptions, solutions to efficiently highlight and convey the relevant information, as well as the generation of possible reaction strategies. Additionally, the necessary preparatory work and fundamentals are covered in the discussion, providing guidelines for production companies towards consistent and efficient disruption management.