Prevention of Failures in the Footwear Production Process by Applying Machine Learning

Abstract

At present, the handcrafted footwear sector is affected by the high competitiveness due to the increasing automation of companies. In this sense, in order to improve its competitiveness, a system was proposed to predict the failures of a production system and to carry out preventive maintenance actions. Samples were taken from 25 productions and 7 activities were established: cutting, stitching, pre fabrication, final preparation, gluing, assembly and finishing. The company produces batches of 90 pairs per day, with a standard time of 274.53 min and a promised productivity of 1.8. A support vector machine model was developed to predict the possible failures of the process taking as a reference the standard time of each stage. Finally, the results allow predicting the faults to optimise the production process by applying Support Vector Machine (SVM).