Online Prediction of Molded Part Quality in the Injection Molding Process Using High-Resolution Time Series

Process-data-supported process monitoring in injection molding plays an important role in compensating for disturbances in the process. Until now, scalar process data from machine controls have been used to predict part quality. In this paper, we investigated the feasibility of incorporating time series of sensor measurements directly as features for machine learning models, as a suitable method of improving the online prediction of part quality. We present a comparison of several state-of-the-art algorithms, using extensive and realistic data sets. Our comparison demonstrates that time series data allow significantly better predictions of part quality than scalar data alone. In future studies, and in production-use cases, such time series should be taken into account in online quality prediction for injection molding.