Application of Fractal Dimension in Industry Practice

Abstract

Today, industrial production lines commonly use off-line and automatic on-line quality monitoring and control. Monitoring and control units analyse data from a production process, and analysis should be able to obtain reliable information that correspond with the character of the data obtained. The character of the data set obtained from production processes or from products can be highly structured in all industrial areas. Structured surface, complex time series (topologically one dimensional signals), difficulty to describe dividing curves are much more common than it can be expected. For this kind of data set, a powerful tool for analysis of complexity -fractal geometry (especially a fractal dimension) should be used. The fractal dimension with a combination of statistical tools is an interesting and powerful tool for complex data quantification, for tracing the source of poor quality, production optimization and investigating the source of instability of production process subsystems in industrial applications. The methodology for evaluation of complex and irregular data was developed and applied in industrial practice. This methodology searches appropriated parameters for a complex evaluation of data. Only the chosen parameters are used for a complete analysis of the data in order to reduce processing time.