Monitoring tool wear using classifier fusion

Real time monitoring of manufacturing processes using a single sensor often poses significant challenge. Sensor fusion has thus been extensively investigated in recent years for process monitoring with significant improvement in performance. This paper presents the results for a monitoring system based on the concept of classifier fusion, and class-weighted voting is investigated to further enhance the system performance. Classifier weights are based on the overall performances of individual classifiers, and majority voting is used in decision making. Acoustic emission monitoring of tool wear during the coroning process is used to illustrate the concept. A classification rate of 87.7% was obtained for classifier fusion with unity weighting. When weighting was based on overall performance of the respective classifiers, the classification rate improved to 95.6%. Further using state performance weighting resulted in a 98.5% classification. Finally, the classifier fusion performance further increased to 99.7% when a penalty vote was applied on the weighting factor.