Design and Verification of Process Discovery Based on NLP Approach and Visualization for Manufacturing Industry

When a consultant of a company that provides a smart factory solution consults with a customer, it is difficult to define the outline of the manufacturing process and create all activities within the process by case. It requires a large amount of resources from the company to perform a task. In this study, we propose a process discovery automation system that helps consultants define manufacturing processes. In addition, for process discovery, a fully attention-based transformer model, which has recently shown a strong performance, was applied. To be useful to consultants, we solved the black box characteristics of the deep learning model applied to process discovery and proposed a visualization method that can be used in the monitoring system when explaining the discovery process. In this study, we used the event log of the metal fabrication process to perform the modeling, visualization, and evaluation.