Anwendung von Causal-Discovery-Algorithmen zur Root-Cause-Analyse in der Fahrzeugmontage

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a quality management method that aims to systematically investigate and identify the cause-and-effect relationships of problems and their underlying causes. Traditional methods are based on the analysis of problems by subject matter experts. In modern production processes, large amounts of data are collected. For this reason, increasingly computer-aided and data-driven methods are used for RCA. One of these methods are Causal Discovery Algorithms (CDA). This publication demonstrates the application of CDA on data from the assembly of a leading automotive manufacturer. The algorithms used learn the causal structure between the characteristics of the manufactured vehicles, the ergonomics and the temporal scope of the involved assembly processes, and quality-relevant product features based on representative data. This publication compares various CDAs in terms of their suitability in the context of quality management. For this purpose, the causal structures learned by the algorithms as well as their runtime are compared. This publication provides a contribution to quality management and demonstrates how CDAs can be used for RCA in assembly processes.

Knowledge Graph Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Failure Mode and Effects Analysis

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a critical tool for mitigating potential failures, particular during ramp-up phases of new products. However, its effectiveness is often limited by the missing reasoning capabilities of the FMEA tools, which are usually tabular structured. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) offer novel prospects for fine-tuning on custom datasets for reasoning within FMEA contexts. However, LLMs face challenges in tasks that require factual knowledge, a gap that retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches aim to fill. RAG retrieves information from a non-parametric data store and uses a language model to generate responses. Building on this idea, we propose to advance the non-parametric data store with a knowledge graph (KG). By enhancing the RAG framework with a KG, our objective is to leverage analytical and semantic question-answering capabilities on FMEA data. This paper contributes by presenting a new ontology for FMEA observations, an algorithm for creating vector embeddings from the FMEA KG, and a KG enhanced RAG framework. Our approach is validated through a human study and we measure the performance of the context retrieval recall and precision.