Predictive maintenance for a wood chipper using supervised machine learning

Sammanfattning: With a predictive model that can predict failures of a manufacturing machine, many benefits can be obtained. Unnecessary downtime and accidents can be avoided. In this study a wood chipper which has 12 replaceable knives was examined. The specific task was to create a predictive model that can predict if a knife change is needed or not. To create a predictive model, supervised machine learning was used. Decision forest was the algorithm used in this study. Data samples were collected from vibration measurements. Each sample was labeled with help of ocular inspections of the knives. Microsoft Azure learning studio was the workspace used to train all models. The data set acquired consist of 106 samples, were only 9 samples belongs to the minority class. Two strategies of training a model were used, with and without oversampling. The result for the best model without oversampling obtained 87.5% precision and 77.8% recall. The best model with oversampling achieved 79% precision and 86.7% recall. This result indicates that the trained models can be useful. However, the validity of the result has been hurt by a small data set and many uncertainness of acquiring the data set.