Qualitative behavior rules for the cold rolling process extracted from trained ANN via the FCANN method

Nowadays, artificial neural networks (ANN) are being widely used in the representation of different systems and physics processes. In this paper, a neural representation of the cold rolling process will be considered. In general, once trained, the networks are capable of dealing with operational conditions not seen during the training process, keeping acceptable errors in their responses. However, humans cannot assimilate the knowledge kept by those networks, since such knowledge is implicit and difficult to be extracted. For this reason, the neural networks are considered a “black-box”.In this work, the FCANN method based on formal concept analysis (FCA) is being used in order to extract and represent knowledge from previously trained ANN. The new FCANN approach permits to obtain a non-redundant canonical base with minimum implications, which qualitatively describes the process. The approach can be used to understand the relationship among the process parameters through implication rules in different operational conditions on the load-curve of the cold rolling process. Metrics for evaluation of the rules extraction process are also proposed, which permit a better analysis of the results obtained.