Development of Machine Learning Models to Predict Strip Breakage During the Aluminium Cold Rolling Process

The aluminium processing industry relies on cold rolling as a crucial method for producing materials essential to everyday life. As a consequence of thickness reduction: Strip Breakage, which is one of the main degraders in the aluminum rolling process, arises. In more recent related studies, data were mainly chosen by experts, which can sometimes hide crucial causal factors. Therefore, this work develops Machine Learning models to predict strip breakage, by investigating the relationship between features and the breakage event, using attribute selection techniques to reduce the dimensionality of the problem, comparing classification methods based on trees, such as Decision Trees (DT), Random Forest (RF) and Extra Trees (ET). This work uses the following methodology: first, the models were evaluated for the complete set of data with default initial parameters, then a new evaluation of the models was carried out with the optimized parameters still with high data dimensions, and finally, an evaluation was carried out of the models with the best-selected attributes. The model that performed best was the DT with 21 attributes, with a recall or TPR (True Positive Rate) of 0.863 and an AUC (Compute Area Under of ROC Curve) of 0.926. The models also indicated that there is no unique cause that characterizes the breaks in the aluminium cold mill, but several others, such as the effect of the rolling mill, coil history domain, oil mill and lamination cylinders.