How Democratized Artificial Intelligence Can Move Manufacturing to a New Evolution Pace
3. The guided next best action/decision is
the third AI topic available for many
business areas. This AI technology helps
to identify the usual and best patterns
for selecting the right next best action
based on well-known decision trees and
new decision trees built on-the-fly from
smart analytics. Those decision trees
help to follow a path of logical decision-
making based on guided questions,
assumptions and recommendations
identified by the consolidation and
correlation of historical behaviors.
Those tools are, for instance, using a mix
of
NLP
(Natural
Language
20
Programming) and Machine Learning
algorithms to analyze questions and
identify likely answers based on existing
documentation, previous answers or
text describing a solution. This is the
case for digital robot tools, aka
chatbots, 21 for example.
In the case of potential failure of my
industrial equipment which has been
detected by predictive AI and confirmed
by an abnormal machine learning
pattern detection, the question
becomes: Must I stop my production
line right now to fix the issue or can I
keep it running until the end of my
production batch? What if the potential
failure is happening at 90% in 3 hours
and my production series will be
completed in 1 hour? The AI next best
action will guide me to consider several
parameters from production plan,
maintenance scheduling, potential
failure and historical fixing behaviors to
help me to decide to wait and update
my maintenance plan instead of
stopping
my
production
line
immediately as the equipment alert is
suggesting. Then, AI will recommend I
anticipate spare parts ordering and
Figure 5: Example of guided decision based on AI in asset issue fixing
20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing
21 https://blogs.oracle.com/mobile/getting-started-with-chatbots-v2
IIC Journal of Innovation
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