Development of a Robust Machine Learning Model to Monitor the Operational Performance of Fixed-Post Multi-Blade Vertical Sawing Machines

Monitoring the operational performance of the sawmilling industry has become important for many applications including strategic and tactical planning. Small-scale sawmilling facilities do not hold automatic production management capabilities mainly due to using obsolete technology which is an effect of low financial capacity and focus their strategy on increasing value recovery and saving resources and energy. Based on triaxial acceleration data collected over five days at a sampling rate of 1 Hz, a robust machine learning model was developed with the purpose of using it to infer the operational events based on lower sampling rates adopted as a strategy to collect long-term data. Among its performance metrics, the model was characterized in its training phase by a very high overall classification accuracy (CA = 98.7%), F1 score (98.4%) and a very low error rate (LOG LOSS = 5.6%). For a three-class problem, it worked very well in classifying the main events related to the operation of the machine, with active work being characterized by an F1 score of 99.6% and an error of 3.6%. By accounting for the same metrics, the model was proven to be invariant to the sampling rates of up to 0.05 Hz (20 s) and produced even better results in the testing phase (CA = 98.9%, F1 = 98.6%, LOG LOSS = 5.5%, for a testing sample extracted at 0.05 Hz), while there were no differences in the share of class data irrespective of the sampling rate. The developed model not only preserves a high classification performance in the training and testing phases but it also seems to be invariant to lower sampling rates, making it useful for prediction over data collected at low sampling rates. In turn, this would enable the use of cheap data collectors to be operated for extended periods of time in various locations and will save human resources and money associated with data collection. Further tests would be required only for validation and they could be supported by collecting and feeding new data to the model to infer the long-term performance of similar sawmilling machines