Roll Wear Prediction in Strip Cold Rolling with Physics-Informed Autoencoder and Counterfactual Explanations

Abstract

The development of predictive maintenance (PdM) solutions is one of the key challenges in the industry today. Manufacturing processes are usually well described by the law of physics and mathematical equations, but the irregularity and randomness of the asset degradation process make it a demanding task to model it. This makes physics-driven models insufficient for this kind of problem. On the other hand, data-driven models, mainly Artificial Intelligence (AI), are gaining much interest in research and applications due to their flexibility and robustness. A compromise between these two approaches are hybrid models that take into account the physics of the process and use modern AI methods to learn its behavior. The next challenge for AI models is to provide information on their reasoning to build understading and trustworthiness, which can be achieved through post-hoc Explainable AI (XAI) methods. In this paper, we use a Physics-Informed Autoencoder (PIAE) in a semi-supervised manner to learn the degradation process of work rolls in the cold- rolling process. We incorporate physics knowledge into the AI model by extending its input space and applying feature masking during the prediction phase. The results of the research show that such an architecture is capable of distinguising between low- and high-wear observations. Furthermore, we include the XAI layer in the model, which gives explanations for the prediction of the model through counterfactuals.