Leveraging feature extraction and risk-based clustering for advanced fault diagnosis in equipment

In the contemporary manufacturing landscape, the advent of artificial intelligence and big data analytics has been a game-changer in enhancing product quality. Despite these advancements, their application in diagnosing failure probability and risk remains underexplored. The current practice of failure risk diagnosis is impeded by the manual intervention of managers, leading to varying evaluations for identical products or similar facilities. This study aims to bridge this gap by implementing advanced data analysis techniques on maintenance data from an aluminum extruder. We have employed text embedding, dimensionality reduction, and feature extraction methods, integrating the K-means algorithm with the Silhouette Score for risk level classification. Our findings reveal that the combination of Word2Vec for embedding and Contractive Auto Encoder for dimensionality reduction and feature extraction yields high-performance results. The optimal cluster count, identified as three, achieved the highest Silhouette Score. Statistical analysis using one-way ANOVA confirmed the significance of these findings with a p-value of 5.3213 × e−6, well within the 5% significance threshold. Furthermore, this study utilized BERTopic for topic modeling to extract principal topics from each cluster, facilitating an in-depth analysis of the clusters in relation to the extruder’s characteristics. The outcome of this research offers a novel methodology for facility managers to objectively diagnose equipment failures. By minimizing subjective judgment, this approach is poised to significantly enhance the efficacy of quality assurance systems in manufacturing, leveraging the robust capabilities of artificial intelligence.