Evolutionary LSTM-FCN networks for pattern classification in industrial processes

The Industry 4.0 revolution allows gathering big amounts of data that are used to train and deploy Artificial Intelligence algorithms to solve complex industrial problems, optimally and automatically. From those, Long-Short Term Memory Fully Convolutional Network (LSTM-FCN) networks are gaining a lot of attention over the last decade due to their capability of successfully modeling nonlinear feature interactions. However, they have not been yet fully applied for pattern classification tasks in time series data within the digital industry. In this paper, a novel approach based on an evolutionary algorithm for optimizing the networks hyperparameters and on the resulting deep learning model for pattern classification is proposed. In order to demonstrate the applicability of this method, a test scenario that involves a process related to blind fastener installation in the aeronautical industry is provided. The results achieved with the proposed approach are compared with shallow models and it is demonstrated that the proposed method obtains better results with an accuracy value of 95%.