SSMSPC: self-supervised multivariate statistical in-process control in discrete manufacturing processes

Self-supervised learning has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on various anomaly detection tasks. Learning effective representations by solving a supervised pretext task with pseudo-labels generated from unlabeled data provides a promising concept for industrial downstream tasks such as process monitoring. In this paper, we present SSMSPC a novel approach for multivariate statistical in-process control (MSPC) based on self-supervised learning. Our motivation for SSMSPC is to leverage the potential of unsupervised representation learning by incorporating self-supervised learning into the general statistical process control (SPC) framework to develop a holistic approach for the detection and localization of anomalous process behavior in discrete manufacturing processes. We propose a pretext task called Location + Transformation prediction, where the objective is to classify both, the type and the location of a randomly applied augmentation on a given time series input. In the downstream task, we follow the one-class classification setting and apply the Hotelling’s $$T^2$$ T 2 statistic on the learned representations. We further propose an extension to the control chart view that combines metadata with the learned representations to visualize the anomalous time steps in the process data which supports a machine operator in the root cause analysis. We evaluate the effectiveness of SSMSPC with two real-world CNC-milling datasets and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art anomaly detection approaches, achieving $$100\%$$ 100 % and $$99.6\%$$ 99.6 % AUROC, respectively. Lastly, we deploy SSMSPC at a CNC-milling machine to demonstrate its practical applicability when used as a process monitoring tool in a running process.