Holistic Production Overview: Using XAI for Production Optimization

This chapter introduces the work performed in XMANAI to address the need of explainability in manufacturing AI systems applied to optimize production lines. The XMANAI platform is designed to meet the needs of manufacturing factories, offering them a unified framework to leverage their data and extract valuable insights. Within the project, the Ford use case is focused on forecasting production in a dynamically changing manufacturing line, serving as a practical illustration of the platform capabilities. This chapter focuses on the application of explainability using Hybrid Models and Heterogeneous Graph Machine Learning (ML) techniques. Hybrid Models combine traditional AI models with eXplainable AI (XAI) tools and Heterogeneous Graph ML techniques using Graph Attention (GAT) layers to extract explainability in complex manufacturing scenarios where data that can be represented as a graph. To understand explainability applied to the Ford use case, this chapter describes the initial needs of the scenario, the infrastructure behind the use case and the results obtained, showcasing the effectiveness of this approach, where models are trained in the XMANAI platform. Specifically, a description is given on the results of production forecasting in an engine assembly plant while providing interpretable explanations when deviations from expected are predicted.