Within the context of Industry 4.0, quality assessment procedures using data-driven techniques are becoming more critical due to the generation of massive amounts of production data. In this paper, we address the detection of abnormal screw tightening processes, which is a relevant industrial task. Since labeling is costly, requiring a manual effort, we focus on unsupervised approaches. In particular, we assume a low-dimensional input screw fastening approach that is based only on angle-torque pairs. Using such pairs, we explore three main unsupervised Machine Learning (ML) algorithms: Local Outlier Factor (LOF), Isolation Forest (iForest) and a deep learning Autoencoder (AE). For benchmarking purposes, we also explore a supervised Random Forest (RF) algorithm. Several computational experiments were held by using recent industrial data with 2.8 million angle-torque pair records and a realistic and robust rolling window evaluation. Overall, high quality anomaly discrimination results were achieved by the iForest (99%) and AE (95% and 96%) unsupervised methods, which compared well against the supervised RF (99% and 91%). When compared with iForest, the AE requires less computation effort and provides faster anomaly detection response times.

Within the context of Industry 4.0, quality assessment procedures using data-driven techniques are becoming more critical due to the generation of massive amounts of production data. In this paper, we address the detection of abnormal screw tightening processes, which is a key industrial task. Since labeling is costly, requiring a manual effort, we focus on unsupervised detection approaches. In particular, we assume a computationally light low-dimensional problem formulation based on angle–torque pairs. Our work is focused on two unsupervised machine learning (ML) algorithms: isolation forest (IForest) and a deep learning autoencoder (AE). Several computational experiments were held by assuming distinct datasets and a realistic rolling window evaluation procedure. First, we compared the two ML algorithms with two other methods, a local outlier factor method and a supervised Random Forest, on older data related with two production days collected in November 2020. Since competitive results were obtained, during a second stage, we further compared the AE and IForest methods by adopting a more recent and larger dataset (from February to March 2021, totaling 26.9 million observations and related to three distinct assembled products). Both anomaly detection methods obtained an excellent quality class discrimination (higher than 90%) under a realistic rolling window with several training and testing updates. Turning to the computational effort, the AE is much lighter than the IForest for training (around 2.7 times faster) and inference (requiring 3.0 times less computation). This AE property is valuable within this industrial domain since it tends to generate big data. Finally, using the anomaly detection estimates, we developed an interactive visualization tool that provides explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) knowledge for the human operators, helping them to better identify the angle–torque regions associated with screw tightening failures.