Risk Evaluation for a Manufacturing Process Based on a Directed Weighted Network

The quality of a manufacturing process can be represented by the complex coupling relationship between quality characteristics, which is defined by the directed weighted network to evaluate the risk of the manufacturing process. A multistage manufacturing process model is established to extract the quality information, and the quality characteristics of each process are mapped to nodes of the network. The mixed embedded partial conditional mutual information (PMIME) is used to analyze the causal effect between quality characteristics, wherein the causal relationships are mapped as the directed edges, while the magnitudes of the causal effects are defined as the weight of edges. The node centrality is measured based on information entropy theory, and the influence of a node is divided into two parts, which are local and indirect effects. Moreover, the entropy value of the directed weighted network is determined according to the weighted average of the centrality of the nodes, and this value is defined as the risk of the manufacturing process. Finally, the method is verified through a public dataset.