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Condition-based maintenance: Condition-based

maintenance on
an industrial application on rotary machines

rotary machines
Antonio Acernese, Carmen Del Vecchio and Massimo Tipaldi 565
Department of Engineering, University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy
Received 22 October 2019
Nicola Battilani Revised 7 February 2020
Department of Engineering, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Accepted 28 May 2020

Italy, and
Luigi Glielmo
Department of Engineering, University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a model for the design and development of a condition-
based maintenance (CBM) strategy for the cutting group of a labeling machine. The CBM aims to ensure the
quality of labels’ cut and overall machine performances.
Design/methodology/approach – In developing a complete CBM strategy, two main difficulties have to be
overcome: (1) appropriately dealing with incomplete and low-quality production database and (2) selecting the most
promising predictive model. The first issue has been addressed applying data cleansing operations and creating ad
hoc methodology to enlarge the training data. The second issue has been handled developing and comparing an
empirical model with a machine learning (ML)-based model; the comparison has been performed assessing
capabilities thereof in predicting erroneous label cuts on data obtained from an operating plant located in Italy.
Findings – Research results showed that both empirical and ML-based approaches exhibit good performances
in detecting the operating conditions of the cutting machine. The advantage of adopting an ML-based model is
that it can be used not only as a condition indicator (i.e. a model able to continuously provide the health status of
an asset) but also in predictive maintenance policies (i.e. a CBM carried out following a forecast of the
degradation of the item).
Research limitations/implications – The study described in this manuscript has been developed on the
practices of a labeling machine developed by an international company manufacturing bottling lines for
beverage industry. The proposed approach might need some customization in case it is applied to other
industries. Future researches can validate the applicability of such models on different rotary machines in other
companies and similar industries.
Originality/value – The main contribution of this paper lies in the empirical demonstration of the benefits of
CBM and predictive maintenance in manufacturing, through the overcoming of a specific production issue. The
large number of variables involved in thin label cutting lines (film thickness between 30 and 38 mm), the high
throughput and the high costs due to production interruptions render the prediction of non-conforming labels an
economically relevant, albeit challenging, goal. Moreover, despite the large scientific literature on CBM in rolling
bearing and face cutting movements, papers dealing with rotary labeling machines are very unusual and unique.
Keywords Condition based maintenance, Failure signature analysis, Cleansing data, Prognostics, Weighted
root mean square variation model, Enlarging data set, Machine learning
Paper type Case study

1. Introduction
In recent years, industrial plant maintenance has evolved from a complementary service
detached from the production lines into a sophisticated, integrated and knowledge-based
management system, with condition-based maintenance (CBM) and predictive
Journal of Quality in Maintenance
maintenance (PdM) becoming increasingly prominent in the context of industrial Engineering
maintenance engineering. The difference between CBM and PdM is very mild; CBM is Vol. 27 No. 4, 2021
pp. 565-585
the process of selecting and monitoring a set of specific parameters or working conditions © Emerald Publishing Limited
1355-2511
of industrial machinery, whose variations are symptomatic of an impending failure (Shin DOI 10.1108/JQME-10-2019-0101
JQME and Jun, 2015). The most common parameters are vibrations (Yunusa-kaltungo and Sinha,
27,4 2017), temperatures, oil degradation (Azevedo and Olsen, 2019), electrical variables and so
forth. PdM can be considered an evolution of the CBM. In fact, it is a CBM derived from a
prediction of the degradation of the item; forecasts are usually made through machine
learning analysis of known machine characteristics and the evaluation of process
parameters. The estimation of the remaining useful life (RUL) and the prediction of a future
potential fault enable the planning of maintenance before fault actually happens (Li et al.,
566 2017). A complete list of the advantages of predictive maintenance programs (PMP) can be
found in Carnero (2005).
Smart industrial maintenance paradigms are promoters of Industry 4.0 (Garg and
Deshmukh, 2006; Yan et al., 2017). CBM and PdM gather two key features, in particular
technical assistance – catching errors that humans could hardly detect – and decentralized
decision-making based on data – supporting operators to take maintenance decisions.
These properties contribute to reducing machine downtime and increasing operators’
safety.
Manufacturers adopting CBM strategies have undoubted advantages: machine parts are
exploited for their entire lifespan and unplanned downtime is avoided. Moreover, factories
equipped with technologies enabling PMP allow machine-to-machine communication and
learning which improves productivity and safety.
CBM is a promoter of Industry 4.0, but it is also sustained by this latest industrial
revolution. Indeed, CBMs only apply to plants equipped with Industry 4.0 technologies:
data from monitored processes must integrate with plant intranet infrastructures;
information on assets degradation or process inconsistencies should be extracted from
raw industrial data using advanced data analytic tools. Decision support systems
(DSS) can make use of such processed information and serve the overall industrial
process management and operations in helping people make decisions in a constantly
changing business environment (Felsberger et al., 2016; Marques et al., 2017).
Moreover, CBM and PdM strongly improve the safety and reliability of equipment,
providing advantages from technological, process and economic perspectives
(Hernandez and Labib, 2017).
The application of CBM is usually limited by the installation of the required monitoring
system which is usually sophisticated and expensive. Indeed, CBM and PdM are not always
feasible in real-world application (Tiddens et al. (2018)); before starting a CBM project, one
should evaluate the trade-off between the failure frequency and the effect of the breakdown
on the production, such as downtime costs and safety. In general, the initial investment for
these maintenance policies is not paid back when failures are rare or they happen at the end of
the (economic) lifetime of the asset. Indeed, in some cases, the adoption of CBM or PdM
strategies could be more costly than preventive or corrective maintenance: for instance, when
the lifetime of the aging asset can be easily evaluated or when the downtime of the item does
not affect the entire production. Hence, CBM applications are almost limited to sectors where
there is high investment in heavy engineering equipment, such as in aviation, oil-gas
refineries, the energy sector, the semiconductor industry or other sectors with particularly
high production rates (Lai et al., 2019).
The implementation of a CBM policy requires the following three key steps (Lee et al.,
2004; Veldman et al., 2011):
(1) Data collection. The relevant data are collected (offline or online) through the use of
process control systems, vibration measurements, oil sampling and other methods.
(2) Data analysis. Data need to be cleaned and analyzed.
 (3) Decision-making. Based on the gathered analysis, a decision is made in order to Condition-based
recommend efficient maintenance policies. maintenance on
Due to the diversity of sources, the collected data sets may have different levels of quality in rotary machines
terms of noise, redundancy and consistency (Zhou et al., 2017). Pre-processing operation is
necessary to transform acquired data into data sets suitable for the processing function (Li
et al., 2017), aiming at deducing information about the machinery health status and incoming
failures (Li et al., 2007). Such information can be used by the DSS in order to support operators 567
with maintenance intervention.
Industrial CBM approaches strongly depend on the physical system being monitored
and maintained, with most scientific contributions dealing with CBM for specific industrial
cases (Jardine et al., 2006; McKee et al., 2014; Rehorn et al., 2005). Generally, based on the
classification proposed by Garg and Deshmukh (2006) and Peng et al. (2010), the literature
on industrial CBM solutions falls into two main categories. The first category of papers
deals with collection and organization schemes for data gathered from heterogeneous
sources, with the ultimate scope of transforming massive figures into relevant information
(Yan et al., 2017; Lee et al., 2015). One main issue is appropriately dealing with the
incomplete, inaccurate, duplicated raw data collected that require suitable data cleansing
techniques to ensure the reliability of the production data sets (Deng et al., 2018). Indeed,
algorithms to predict breakdown events have been developed for several industries (e.g.
employing data from public data centers) but seldom tested using data from working
plants.
The second category addresses the specific issue of selecting appropriate failure
signatures from data; this operation requires output marker definition, featuring data set and
selecting the most appropriate model to reveal incoming failures. An extensive review on
suitable data labeling techniques may be found in Jahnke (2015). Features analysis for
industrial data sets may be found in Lo
pez-Escobar et al. (2012), Amarnath and Krishna
(2014) and Yan et al. (2014), along with a description of the most commonly used features
generated from temporal, spectral and vibration signals. The choice of the most appropriate
model of incoming failure is the core activity in CBM. Recent research efforts focus on the
application of artificial intelligence techniques in CBM systems: among them, artificial neural
networks (Wang et al., 2010) and support vector machines (SVMs) (Li et al., 2013) have been
mostly adopted. Referring to the specific application we studied, prior researches on CMB in
cutting machines focus on face milling cutting (Madhusudana et al., 2016; Gong et al., 2017),
and on blade material and wear resistance thereof (Kato et al., 2019), but none address the
CBM for thin film cutting.
This paper reports the outcome of an industrial research project in collaboration with a
firm located in central Italy producing plastic bottling production lines. We address the
challenging task of identifying an appropriate CBM model for the film cutting line. To this
end, we developed two models and compared their performance parameters. The first is an
empirical and very intuitive model based on root mean square variation of production data
set. The second is an ML model that overcomes the limit of insufficient number of production
line samples by enlarging the data set and developing a particular technique. Performances
and applicability of the two solutions have been compared, and significant results in defining
a reliable decision system to support operators in resolving machine shutdown have been
obtained.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 outlines the operational functionality of
the labeling machine’s main components and describes the chosen CBM monitoring
system (CBM-MS), along with its characterization. Section 3 presents the CBM-MS data
acquisition, data cleansing and data labeling processes. Section 3 addresses the
identification of a suitable empirical model, focusing on the failure signature detection.
JQME In Section 5, an ML-based model is presented. Section 6 provides final remarks and
27,4 future works.

2. Case study: the cutting group of a labeling machine

Labeling machines are complex, mainly consisting of:

568 (1) A set of rollers that unroll a coil of labels and apply a given strain on the film.
(2) The cutting group, that cuts the film roll into labels.
(3) The hot glue application module that applies labels on the bottles, hence providing the
finished product.
A detailed description of labeling production lines can be found in Werblow and Micha (2010).
This paper focuses on the film cutting group of a specific machine, which has to provide 1,000
labels per minute in nominal conditions, that is, about 26–27 pieces per second. To guarantee
this production rate target, the cutting group works with rotary motion. It is composed of two
parts: a rotating drum, on which a steel blade is installed, and a fixed steel blade, firmly
connected to the chassis (see Figure 1). The cut occurs every time the rotating blade hits the
fixed blade, being the two blades (also called knives) placed at a distance of 30 mm apart. The
label thickness is between 30 and 38 mm; hence, whenever the label film crosses the gap
between the rotating and the fixed blades, the resulting interference enables the film to be cut
precisely and with minimum energy. The continuous friction causes wear and tear on the
blades which consequently need recalibration to adjust the distance between them, so as to
ensure the quality of the cut labels. Usually performed manually by an operator, the cutting
group calibration can, in particular, be achieved through the series of horizontal grub screws
located on the fixed blade (to regulate its profile to that of the rotating blade) and the
longitudinal grub screw (to regulate the distance between the two blades, see Figure 1).
Having a smaller distance would entail physical contact between blades hastening their wear,
whereas excessive distance would cause less precise or even missed label cuts. It is intuitively
understandable that the calibration is a very complex process, since the distance between
knives (of the order of mm) is lower than the resolution of the human eye, leading to frequent
stops due to improper cuts. Moreover, given the high throughput, a sudden shutdown, even
for a short time period, implies a significant waste in production costs. In these operating
conditions, prognostics can prove highly effective; indeed, an appropriate PdM strategy

Figure 1.
Cutting group
schematic
could suitably address the fault uncertainty and the sudden stops, problems that greatly limit Condition-based
the applicability of reactive and preventive maintenance approaches for such a process. maintenance on
rotary machines
2.1 The proposed CBM monitoring system
A CBM-MS is responsible for acquiring and buffering all the parameters needed to
implement the maintenance policy. At this stage, the selection of transducers able to sense
the failure casuistry is crucial (Koenig et al., 2019). In our case, the following sensors have 569
been used:
(1) Four mono-axial piezoelectric accelerometers, placed on the first four grub screws of
the fixed blade, orthogonal to the rotating drum of the cutting group.
(2) Four PT-100 temperature transducers, positioned as follows: one directly in contact
with the fixed blade, two in the lubricating oil recirculation chamber and one near the
labeling machine frame to measure the environmental temperature.
(3) An encoder positioned on the motor shaft.
The contact between the two blades can create vibrational modes on the overall cutting
group, which can be detected by the accelerometer. Moreover, changes in boundary
conditions, for example, an increase in temperature, might induce volumetric variations of
mechanical parts: due to their thickness, blades could be particularly exposed to such
phenomena.
The above-mentioned sensors, along with the data acquisition system – a programmable
logic controller (PLC) – serve as the CBM-MS, see Figure 2. The MS is constrained by the PLC
buffer size (i.e. 8,192 samples). Given a sampling frequency of 5 kHz for the accelerometers,
each acquisition lasts for approximately 1.6 s. Conversely, signals generated by the other
transducers are sampled at a frequency of 2.5 kHz. All the acquired data have been
synchronized by using two different timestamps. We explicitly note that all the following
analyses have been performed in offline mode; acquired data have been stored in a remote
analyzer (i.e. a personal computer) via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Therefore, the “analyzer”
block has not been used.

Piezoelectric
Accelerometer
PLC B&R:
fs,max = 5190 Hz
buffer: 8192 samples

PT100 Temperature
Transducer Memory
Sampler Analyzer
Manager

FTP
Encoder Figure 2.
Remote The proposed CBM
Analyzer monitoring system
JQME 2.2 CBM-MS characterization
27,4 We studied the cutting group of the labeling machine under different operating conditions.
This is a standard preliminary step in prognostics (Zhu, 1996), its objective being to verify
whether the chosen CBM-MS is suitable for sensing all the operating system conditions.
To start with, we analyzed system noise by collecting data after turning on all the
components and activating the rotating drum without the film. Then, we performed three
different sets of tests. The first group of tests consisted in placing the film on the machine and
570 varying the drum revolution speed, in order to check if the vibration signal variations were
consistent with the operating rate. Figure 3 shows the evolution of the first accelerometer over
time, with the drum rotating at three different revolution speeds. The periodical peaks
reported in Figure 3 are evident at any speed; they correspond to the contacts between the
blades and the film, proving that the accelerometers are able to register the label cuts. In what
follows, we will equivalently refer to accelerometer measures as accelerations or vibrations.
The second group of tests sought to determine whether temperature variations could
affect film cut quality. Over 24 acquisitions carried out, data collection began without waiting
for the machine to warm up. Figure 4 show, respectively, the averaged temperature signals (1)
and the root-mean-square (RMS) values of the accelerations (2). Initially being at ambient
temperature, the machine components heat up gradually; greatest variations are observed in
lubricating oil. Nevertheless, Figure 4b shows, at least for relatively short activity periods, the

Drum Rev Spd = 80 rpm

0

-5000

-10000
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6
(a)
Acceleration Channel 1 [mg]

Drum Rev Spd = 500 rpm

0

-5000

-10000
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6
(b)
Drum Rev Spd = 1000 rpm
0

Figure 3.
Acceleration signals -5000
coming from the first
accelerometer during
the regular activity of -10000
the system: low (a), 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6
medium (b) and high (c) Time [s]
drum revolution speed
(c)
temperature increase does not affect the vibrations, which exhibit almost constant trends. Condition-based
Hence, the obtained results are not sufficient to derive a correlation between temperature maintenance on
variations and vibrations. However, verification of such a correlation should be derived by
running longer tests. The third group of tests consisted in reproducing the progressive blade
rotary machines
consumption. In particular, starting from the cutting group calibration set by the operator,
the gap between the two blades was manually increased, up to the point of obtaining an
improper cut quality. Figure 5 shows the RMS values of acceleration signals collected from
the four channels versus the angular position of the longitudinal grub screw, which is 571
proportional to the distance between blades. Each acquisition has been performed increasing
the distance between the two knives by 1 mm, corresponding to a rotation of 608 of the
longitudinal grub screw. Test results can be summarized as follows: (1) the RMS values of the
last acquisition (corresponding to an improper cut) are significantly greater than the ones
detected in cases of nominal cut qualities and (2) the RMS values of the first acquisition are
higher than those obtained by spacing the blades apart by 1 mm. This behavior is probably
due to the human calibration issue: operator set distance between blades being too close,

55
Knife Environment
Oil, operator side Oil, machine side
50
Temperature [°C]

45

40

35

30

25
0 5 10 15 20 25
Number of test
(a)
400
Ch 1 Ch2
350 Ch 3 Ch4
[mg]

300

250
acceleration

200

150
RMS

Figure 4.
100 Average values of the
four temperatures over
50 the number of test (a)
and the corresponding
0 RMS values of the four
0 5 10 15 20 25 accelerometers (b), at
Number of test high revolution speed
(1,000 rpm)
(b)
JQME 2500

27,4 Ch1
Ch3
Ch2
Ch4

2000

572
RMSavg acceleration [mg]

1500

1000

500
Figure 5.
RMS values of the four
acceleration signals
during the blade aging
emulation, at high
revolution speed 0
(1,000 rpm) 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500
Longitudinal grub screw rotation [°]

causing an initial scrubbing between them imperceptible to the human eye but detected by
the accelerometers.

3. DATA collection and cleansing

We monitored the plant over the entire blade life-cycle, estimated at approximately two
months. The rotating drum speed was managed by the operator so as to stress the cutting
group blades as much as possible, with field data automatically acquired every 30 min.
During the test, an operator periodically checked the label quality, reporting both the
inspection time and the cutting group operating status with the following notations: “Cut” for
proper label cut and “No Cut” for poor quality cut, necessitating a recalibration operation.
These data helped to correlate the acquired signals to the output marker (i.e. the label quality).
The acquired measurements were first pre-processed in order to obtain a suitable data set.
Data needed to be free from acquisitions recorded in off-nominal operating conditions (e.g.
film not placed on the machine, warm up conditions, etc.). Furthermore, outliers had to be
addressed and removed; according to Yuan et al. (2013), an outlier, xout, in time-series is a rare
and isolated value that can be defined as xout ¼ x ∈ X : x > μx ±3σ x ; where X, mx and σ x are
respectively, the entire data set, its average value and its standard deviation. Moreover, a time
synchronous average (TSA) over the drum rotation period for the acceleration data was
performed. This operation served the following objectives: achieving a more compact signal
and a higher signal-to-noise ratio; see Komgom et al. (2007) for an overview. Figure 6 shows an
example of the effectiveness of TSA computed on a single acquisition. Moreover, the
acceleration data coming from the four channels have been averaged so as to obtain an
overall synthesized indication of the behavior of the labeling machine cutting group. Finally, Condition-based
to delete the sensitivity offset of the accelerometer, as suggested in Verma et al. (2013), a maintenance on
Z-normalization was applied on the resulting vibration signal.
rotary machines
4. Failure signature analysis via empirical models
At the end of the pre-processing phase, the data set decreased by approximately 40%,
yielding 1,439 examples. Indeed, a significant number of acquisitions corresponded to 573
machine shutdown status and the subsequent warm-up operations.
We started the analysis of data by identifying some correlations between the RMS
acceleration values and the temperature. As shown in Figure 7, the vibration-temperature
pairs corresponding to a good cut quality (depicted in blue) appear polarized in a region of the
map different from the one related to an unacceptable product quality (in red). However, this
map can only be used to classify the cut quality a posteriori, not as a predictive tool.
To select a convenient failure signature, we needed to analyze the evolution of measured
data over time. To this end, many well-known condition indicators were considered, both in
time and frequency domains. Despite the lack of specific studies on cutting machines, some
statistical indices used to implement PdM models for similar industrial equipment and

2000
Day: 17

0
Accelerationch 1 [mg]

-2000

-4000

-6000

-8000

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6

Time [s]
(a)

2000 2000
Raw data, single revolution TSA

0 0
Accelerationch 1 [mg]

Accelerationch 1 [mg]

-2000 -2000

-4000 -4000

-6000 -6000 Figure 6.

Time synchronous
average example: the
-8000 -8000 single acquisition of
the vibration signal (a),
0 0.02 0.04 0.06 0 0.02 0.04 0.06 the extrapolation of a
Time [s] Time [s] single revolution (b)
and the TSA (c)
(b) (c)
JQME Cut

27,4 2000
No cut

1800

574 1600
[mg]

1400
acceleration

1200
RMS

1000

800

600
Figure 7.
RMS values of the 400
acceleration signal vs
average blade
temperatures 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44
Knife temperature [°C]

products, seemed to be suitable to our case. These include kurtosis, crest factor (CF), energy
operator (EO) and zero-order figure of merit (FM0), which have all proved effective in
monitoring and tracking the health status of gears, bearings and shafts. Sharma and Parey
(2015) proved the effectiveness of kurtosis in gearbox failure diagnosis in advanced cracks.
Vecer et al. (2005) show the CF enabling detection of very tiny surface damages. EO is
designed to reveal the amplitude and phase modulations of the signal of interest and it is
useful for revealing tool pitting and scuffing (Zhu et al., 2014). FM0 is defined as the peak to
peak level of the TSA signal divided by the sum of the amplitudes at the gear mesh frequency
and its corresponding harmonics; the derived time-frequency index can be very useful with
respect to heavy wear, less so in case of minor tooth damages (Zhu et al., 2014).
We applied the above-mentioned indices for the acceleration signal of the labeling
machine. Some of them proved to be sensitive to the quality of film cut process; FM0, for
example, had good performance at the early stages of blade usage, where it clearly
distinguishes the quality of cuts (see Figure 8a, days 1–9). However, when blades start
wearing out, the index performance declines (see Figure 8b, days 44–48), with reliability
thereof being insufficient to derive an objective decision model. Another issue that limits the
applicability of the above-mentioned indicators for this specific application is that the cutting
group calibration is a very sensitive operation and is carried out by human operators; the
distance between blades is likely to change slightly from one calibration to another, leading to
different initial values of the vibration signals, and, consequently, different values of the
above-mentioned indices (as inferred by evaluating the variability of blue samples in
Figure 8). This makes the warning threshold definition for the derived DSS a very difficult
task. This behavior has been outlined in Figure 9, where EO-RMS map of the acceleration is
shown. In particular, EO is computed as the normalized kurtosis from the signal where each
 1.02 Cut Condition-based
1
No cut
Uncertain
maintenance on
rotary machines
0.98

0.96

0.94 575
0.92
acceleration

1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19
Day
(a)
FM0

1.02

0.98

0.96

0.94
Figure 8.
0.92 First-order figure of
merit of the
32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46 48 50 52 acceleration signal in
Day two different time
windows (a and b)
(b)

point is computed as the difference of two squared neighborhood points of the original signal
(Vecer et al., 2005):
P
N
N2 ðΔxi  ΔxÞ4
i¼1
EO ¼  2 ;
P
N
2
ðΔxi  ΔxÞ
i¼1

where Δx is the mean value of the signal Δx. Figure 9 highlights the effect of the human
calibration; indeed, greenish points correspond to the first acquisitions after a recalibration of
the cutting group: at each calibration, machine operators cannot place blades exactly at the
same distance. The slight change of blades’ distance leads to different initial values of the
indices.

4.1 Weighted RMS variation index as failure signature

The statistical index, which proved to be more suitable for predicting label cut failures, was
the ΔRMS of vibration signal, that is, the difference between two subsequent RMS vibration
values, computed over two consecutive acquisition windows. This index focuses on the trend
of the vibration and is sensitive to signal changes. This choice is also supported by Vecer et al.
(2005), which demonstrated that where change in production conditions occurs (e.g. damage
in a gear), the vibration level increases more rapidly than for nominal cases. We believe that a
JQME 8
104
27,4 Cut
No cut
First cut acquisition after recalibration
7

576 6
EOacceleration [a.u.]

Figure 9. 1
EO-RMS map of the 0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000
acceleration signal RMSacceleration [mg]

modification in cutting condition may cause a rapid increase in vibration values that could
well be detected through ΔRMS. In addition, ΔRMS takes into account only the variation
between two subsequent RMS values, thus filtering out the uncertainty linked to initial
vibration levels after the calibration set-up.
We derived a failure signature from the ΔRMS, as follows. First, we divided ΔRMS. by the
time interval between two consecutive acquisitions:
xRMS ðk þ 1Þ  xRMS ðkÞ
vRMS ðkÞ ¼ (1)
tðk þ 1Þ  tðkÞ

Indeed, vibrations induced by the film cutting process tend to change more significantly over
longer time intervals. Conversely, vibration changes can be small if the related acquisitions
are very close in time. Hence, vRMS(k) turned out to be more independent of the time interval
between two consecutive acquisitions.
Then, we performed a weighted average of the old value vRMS(k 1) and the current
information vRMS(k). We also introduced the learning rate p(k), which allows adding a sort of
inertia on its trend and addressing the vibration dispersion induced by the wear:
vRMSw ðkÞ ¼ pðkÞ*vRMS ðkÞ þ ð1  pðkÞÞ*vRMS ðk  1Þ; 0 ≤ pðkÞ ≤ 1: (2)

We refer to this failure signature as “weighted RMS variation index,” denoted as vRMSw ðkÞ.
Figures 11 and 12 show vRMSw ðkÞ calculated in two different time frames. Blue and red dots are
related to acceptable and unacceptable film cuts, respectively. The green dots represent cases of
cut quality not being clearly classifiable: they correspond to all those acquisitions occurring
between the last (certain) “Cut” and the first (certain) “No Cut” conditions observed by the Condition-based
operators thereafter. Note the low variability of the proposed failure signature when the system maintenance on
is in unchanged operating state. This regularity allowed us to define an objective critical
threshold (yellow line in Figures 11 and 12), set as twice the standard deviation of the blue
rotary machines
values. Indeed, supposing that the distribution of such set of values takes shape of a Gaussian
process, it follows that 95% of acquisition classified as “Cut” will be the true negatives and the
remaining 5%, that is, the values further away from the average one, will be erroneously
classified as “No Cut,” but will lead to potential benefits in the prediction of the “No Cut” output 577
labels. Whenever the vRMSw ðkÞ value is above the threshold, an alarm for an imminent failure
can be generated. The performance of the proposed empirical model turned out to be acceptable.
As for the data gathered from the long run test, 18 recalibrations of the cutting group were
performed. The model identified 20 critical values of the failure signature (above the threshold):
16 alarms corresponded to missed cuts and four of them were misclassified as no cut condition.
The model missed predicting the no cut condition only two times.
We summarized the steps followed in developing the complete testing process for the
empirical model; the resulting flux diagram is represented in Figure 10. The main advantages
of vRMSw can be outlined as follows:
(1) It can be computed online, and it is easy to evaluate, satisfying company
requirements.
(2) It can be used as a condition monitoring model because it provides good performance
with only two false negatives.
(3) It provides an interpretation of uncertain conditions; in some time intervals, the status
of the machine is not clearly classified (e.g. in Figure 12b, there are no certain output
markers during night acquisitions). The vRMSw could very likely be able to detect the
time instant of cut-no cut switch, but further validation tests should be run.
The major drawback of such model is that the evaluation of the failure signature requires four
consecutive acquisitions; for example, if the time between two acquisitions is 30 min, the
monitoring system will have an initial dead time interval of two hours during which it will not
be able to predict the operational health of the knives.

5. Cut quality prediction using ML approach

By classifier, we mean a function from the feature space to a finite set of classes, that is,
f : Rn → f0; 1g; where n is the number of features. The classes 0 and 1 respectively represent

Types of data acquired: Data cleansing: Data pre-processing:

- acceleration; - null values; - TSA;
- temperature; - off nominal operating - outliers;
- angular position. conditions. - standardization.

Compute Are perfor- no Are perfor- no

∆RMS vRMS weighted
RMS value mance good? mance good?

Figure 10.
Flux diagram of the
yes yes Alarm empirical model
threshold methodology
definition
JQME 60 Cut

27,4 No cut
Uncertain
40 Downtime
Warning threshold

20

578 0

-20
[mg/min]

3 5 7 9 11
Day
(a)
w
RMS

60
v

40

20

Figure 11. -20

vRMSw of the vibration 17
data during blade life- Day
cycle (first period)
(b)

the two possible values of the given cut quality: the class 0 indicates a correct film cut and
class 1 an improper one. We considered only these two conditions, thus clearing out all the
instances marked as “downtime” and “uncertain.” The greatest challenge turned out to be the
lack of data. Indeed, by considering only “Cut” and “No Cut” conditions, the number of
available examples significantly decreased to 683 instances, effectively impending the
appropriate applicability of ML techniques. In the below sub-sections we will refer to this data
set as “primary data set.” In order to increase the number of examples, we exploited the
information that each raw data acquisition contains 26–27 cut events in 1.6 s. We redefined an
example as two consecutive cuts of that specific acquisition window, without performing the
TSA pre-processing operation for the vibration data and the average of the four piezoelectric
accelerometers. In this way, the available data set increased almost 15 times, thus obtaining
10,245 instances. We will refer to this data set as “enlarged data set.”
We considered a supervised learning setting, where a training set
T ¼ fðxi ; yi Þ; i ¼ 1; :::; Ng is given, namely, a set of feature vectors xi, each corresponding
to a label yi containing the quality class, where N is the number of available examples. The
training is the process by which, based on the training set, the decision function is chosen by
assigning specific values to its parameters. The most appropriate decision function for the
label cutting machine and training thereof is described in the following subsection.

5.1 Type of classifiers and their implementation

Among the possible classifiers, it was decided to employ an SVM approach (Abe et al., 2005),
thanks to its well-known capability of dealing with non-linearly separable patterns while
 200
Condition-based
Cut
No cut
maintenance on
150 Uncertain rotary machines
Downtime
Warning threshold
100

50
579

0
vRMS [mg/min]

37 39
Day
(a)
w

40

30

20

10 Figure 12.
vRMSw of the vibration
0 data during blade life-
cycle (second period)
-10 represents the two
possible values of the
46 given cut quality: the
Day class 0 indicates a
correct
(b)

limiting the overfitting. Moreover, SVM models can be trained (in deterministic polynomial
time) by solving a convex quadratic program. The SVM classifier is of the following form:
X 
f ðxÞ ¼ sign yi αi Kðxi ; xÞ þ b ;

where, as it is well-known, the coefficients αi and b are found during the training phase, and
K(x, y) is a design parameter called kernel function. Preliminary experiments were conducted
with a radial basis function (RBF) kernel, since it has proven effective in a large number of
applications (Abe et al., 2005; Pin et al., 2013). Because of its performance in terms of accuracy
(i.e. the ratio between correctly classified instances and the total evaluated instances), the 5th
d
order polynomial kernel Kðx; yÞ ¼ ðxT y=c þ 1Þ was chosen, where d and c are constants
representing the polynomial order and the scaling of the inputs in the kernel function,
respectively (Van Gestel et al., 2004).
Typically, in case of a “not desirable” class (i.e. the positive class corresponding to the “No
cut” condition), the data set is imbalanced, presenting more instances of one given class over
another one. Among the various techniques available to address this problem (that may
introduce a bias toward the most represented class), we adopted the SVM-WEIGHT method
that revealed effective in similar cases; see Del Vecchio et al. (2019) for an overview. In
particular, we decided to employ a higher penalty value for the false negative cases
(corresponding to an erroneously proper cut classification) than for the false positive cases. In
this way, we sought to obtain an SVM model with the lowest number of false negatives.
JQME Indeed, it is reasonable to minimize all the missed alarms, at the cost of increasing the number
27,4 of false alarms (false positives).
The process data and their related “production features,” along with a brief description,
are shown in Table 1. In order to achieve an appropriate predictive model, we related the input
features of the k-th acquisition to the cut quality of the subsequent acquisition, obtaining a
prediction of the upcoming output (i.e. cut quality) 30 min in advance.
Table 2 shows the parameters and performance of the classifier: 80% of data have been
580 used as training set and 20% as test set. Data corresponding to improper cut quality belong to
class P, whereas class N denotes data corresponding to proper cut quality. Note the imbalance
between the two classes: the number of no cut instances is only 12% of the whole set of
examples. As for the test set, the classifier exhibits 95.67% accuracy and 87.67% recall (i.e.
the number of true positives over all the predicted positives).
After training the classifier on the enlarged data set, it then needs to be suitably readapted
in order to be applied to the primary data set. To this end, we defined a voting decision
k
function as gðby Þ : R → f0; 1g. The underling idea is that, given a number of predicted cut
k
events by within the single acquisition window k, the output of the voting decision function
k
gðby Þ will be the most frequently predicted class in the enlarged data set. It is defined as
follows:
8
>
>
> 1 X M
k
>
> 1 if ybi ≥ 0:5
< M i¼1
k
gðby Þ ¼ (3)
>
> XM
>
> 1 k
>
: 0 if M ybi < 0:5;
i¼1

where M is the number of cut events extracted from the k-th window in the enlarged data set
k
and by is the prediction related to the whole acquisition window.
Table 3 shows the performance of the proposed classifier: by adopting this strategy, the
predictive model improved by achieving 97.81% accuracy and 90% recall on the test set.
Moreover, following the Postulate 2 introduced by Tiddens et al. (2015), we analyzed the most
informative parameters in order to minimize the cost associated to the monitoring system.
Differently from the expectations, all the four accelerometers are responsible for model
performances (see the low values of accuracy and precision in the first confusion matrix of
Table 4). However, in the second confusion matrix, one can note that the choice of using all the
temperature sensors is not strictly necessary. Indeed, by using all the accelerometers and only
two of four temperatures, the performance of the model does not decrease. This choice is
coherent with the physics of the cutting group under test; the second transducer of the oil
temperature does not add significant information, as well as the environmental temperature
does not affect the quality of the cut.
The proposed SVM methodology can be summarized in the following manner:

Process data Feature symbol Feature description

Vibration on μ, σ 2, kurt Mean, variance, kurtosis

Four channels max, min, RMS max, min and RMS values
Table 1. Temperature 1 T1 Blade temperature
List of employed Temperature 2, 3 T2, T3 Oil temperatures
features Temperature 4 T4 Environmental temperature
Number of samples 10,245
Condition-based
Class N 8,985 maintenance on
Class P 1,260 rotary machines
% P/(Nþ P) 12.2987
Cost matrix 0 1
8 0
Confusion matrix on training set Predicted N predicted P
actual N 7,025 205 581
actual P 20 940
Precision 0.8210
Recall 0.9792
Accuracy 0.9725
F-measure 0.8911
Confusion matrix on test set Predicted N predicted P
actual N 1703 52
actual P 37 263 Table 2.
Precision 0.8349 Parameters and
Recall 0.8767 performance of the
Accuracy 0.9567 SVM-weighted
F-measure 0.8553 classifier

Number of samples 683

Confusion matrix on training set Predicted N Predicted P
actual N 476 6
Actual P 1 63
Precision 0.9130
Recall 0.9844
Accuracy 0.9872
F-measure 0.9474
Confusion matrix on test set Predicted N Predicted P
actual N 116 1
actual P 2 18
Precision 0.9474
Recall 0.9000 Table 3.
Accuracy 0.9781 Performance of the
F-measure 0.9231 proposed classifier

(1) Offline mode:

 Cleanse and pre-process the data.
 Randomize the available data set and split it into training and test data sets.
 Enlarge the data sets.
 Define and train an SVM classifier to predict the cut quality.
 Check performance on test set.
(2) Online mode:
 Given an acquisition window, split data using the same criterion adopted during
the training step.
 Randomize data and perform the feature extraction.
JQME Vibration on channel 1, temperatures 1, 2, 3 and 4
27,4 Confusion matrix on test set Predicted N Predicted P
Actual N 103 14
Actual P 2 18
Precision 0.5625
Recall 0.9000
Accuracy 0.6923
582 F-measure 0.8832
Vibration on four channels, temperatures 1 and 2
Confusion matrix on test set Predicted N Predicted P
Actual N 116 1
Actual P 2 18
Table 4. Precision 0.9474
Performance on test set Recall 0.9000
using a different Accuracy 0.9781
number of sensors F-measure 0.9231

 Predict the output markers on the basis of time interval between two consecutive
acquisition windows (in our case 30 min horizon).
 Synthesize the predictions based on (3), thereby obtaining the prediction of the
output (cut quality).
The proposed methodology has been customized for our purposes, that is, labeling machines
with rotating parts. Nevertheless, we believe that it could be applied to manufacturing
processes where each data acquisition event refers to the same combination of repetitive
mechanical movements, and the output marker is unique.
The advantages of the proposed ML model can be summarized as follows:
(1) It predicts the quality of cuts with good performance: there are only two false
negatives and a single missed cut on the test set.
(2) It can be used online.
(3) It always predicts the output within the same horizon (30 min).
We underline that the CBM was performed completely offline and the time involved in the
prediction of the single acquisition was of 4.649 ms, using an Intel inside i5 processor.
5.2 Conclusive remarks
Both methodologies (empirical and ML models) showed good performance in detecting
system operating conditions. The appropriateness of selecting between the two approaches
depends on the specific application; an ML-based model is indeed known to improve its
performance with the experience whereupon it could achieve even better results than the
empirical approach by increasing the number of examples. On the other hand, failure
signature evaluated through vRMSw index is very intuitive and demonstrates good
performance with a small number of samples, hence making it suitable for this specific
application. Compared to failure signature-based model, the ML-based approach has an
important advantage: it can predict the output marker, meaning that it can be used in both
PdM and CBM policies.

6. Conclusion and future work

This paper presented a data-driven CBM system for the film cutting group of an industrial
labeling machine. After briefly describing such industrial machinery and its CBM system, we
focused on the definition of a proper predictive model for upcoming failures. More
specifically, we addressed and compared both empirical and ML-based models. With regards Condition-based
to the former, we selected a model based on the weighted root mean square variations of the maintenance on
vibration data. This allowed us to define a warning threshold to detect such failure
conditions. As for the latter, we considered an SVM based classifier. In both cases, we had to
rotary machines
deal with defining a appropriately labeled data set. Notable results in defining a reliable
decision system to support operators in machine shutdown events were obtained.
The proposed predictive models have been tested on real data acquired from working
plant. Experiments of the efficiency of the developed CBM strategy have been made offline on 583
a test machine to avoid interruptions of the labeling line. Future applications concern with the
industrialization of the CMB strategy: cutting machine could be equipped with a control unit
implementing the CBM model on working plants, hence providing alarm signals whenever
there will be anomalies in working conditions.
Finally, a further step will be the automation (i.e. without human intervention) of the
recalibration process in case of upcoming off-nominal conditions.

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Corresponding author
Antonio Acernese can be contacted at: antonio.acernese@unisannio.it

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