Building an Analytical Platform of Big Data for Quality Inspection in the Dairy Industry: A Machine Learning Approach

As one of the processes in the manufacturing industry, quality inspection inspects the intermediate products or final products to separate the good-quality goods that meet the quality management standard and the defective goods that do not. The manual inspection of quality in a mass production system may result in low consistency and efficiency. Therefore, the quality inspection of mass-produced products involves automatic checking and classifying by the machines in many processes. Although there are many preceding studies on improving or optimizing the process using the data generated in the production process, there have been many constraints with regard to actual implementation due to the technical limitations of processing a large volume of data in real time. The recent research studies on big data have improved the data processing technology and enabled collecting, processing, and analyzing process data in real time. This paper aims to propose the process and details of applying big data for quality inspection and examine the applicability of the proposed method to the dairy industry. We review the previous studies and propose a big data analysis procedure that is applicable to the manufacturing sector. To assess the feasibility of the proposed method, we applied two methods to one of the quality inspection processes in the dairy industry: convolutional neural network and random forest. We collected, processed, and analyzed the images of caps and straws in real time, and then determined whether the products were defective or not. The result confirmed that there was a drastic increase in classification accuracy compared to the quality inspection performed in the past.