Machine learning and deep learning based predictive quality in manufacturing: a systematic review

With the ongoing digitization of the manufacturing industry and the ability to bring together data from manufacturing processes and quality measurements, there is enormous potential to use machine learning and deep learning techniques for quality assurance. In this context, predictive quality enables manufacturing companies to make data-driven estimations about the product quality based on process data. In the current state of research, numerous approaches to predictive quality exist in a wide variety of use cases and domains. Their applications range from quality predictions during production using sensor data to automated quality inspection in the field based on measurement data. However, there is currently a lack of an overall view of where predictive quality research stands as a whole, what approaches are currently being investigated, and what challenges currently exist. This paper addresses these issues by conducting a comprehensive and systematic review of scientific publications between 2012 and 2021 dealing with predictive quality in manufacturing. The publications are categorized according to the manufacturing processes they address as well as the data bases and machine learning models they use. In this process, key insights into the scope of this field are collected along with gaps and similarities in the solution approaches. Finally, open challenges for predictive quality are derived from the results and an outlook on future research directions to solve them is provided.