AiF proposal "Knowledge based pre-processing of process data"

Due to the progress in information technology that has been made in the last years the amount of measurement data which are available from running production processes has increased remarkably. The analysis of these measurement data offers optimization potential with respect to cost and quality and the possibility to detect faults in a production process in case of problems. In that field especially small and medium industry (SMI) companies are operating which offer special software tools, project management and consulting for process optimization. Despite the high availability of process measurement data the economic potential of process data analyses is only rarely exploited. The reason for that phenomenon lies in the enormous initial effort, often up to 80% of the whole data analysis, for data pre-processing.

The submitted research project aims at a dramatic reduction of this initial effort by developing a knowledge-based methodology for the efficient pre-processing of process data:

• Consistency of different steps for pre-processing when using various tools (subsequently) will be assured in order to prevent errors due to data conversion that is needed between these tools
• Pre-processing steps will be made comprehensible so that the use of the pre-processed data can be assessed even at a later date
• Reuse of algorithms and procedures for pre-processing will be supported
• Possible errors in the data (missing values etc.) or in pre-processing procedures will be prevented or at least be detected at an earlier stage