High-dimensional variability in manufacturing processes presents significant challenges for quality control, demanding predictive strategies capable of capturing complex parameter dependencies. Machine learning (ML) offers robust mechanisms for this purpose, but reliance on black-box models often limits interpretability and hinders producing stakeholders’ identification of meaningful correlations for model optimization. This paper introduces an interactive what-if simulation platform designed to explore structural quality correlations in automotive assembly through explainable ML techniques, enhancing transparency and enabling uncertainty quantification. The platform is based on a modular Digital Twin (DT) architecture aligned with the ISO 23247 standard, guiding expert and non-expert users through correlation-driven feature selection, regression modelling and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) based post-hoc explanations. A case study using real inspection data from a vehicle assembly line demonstrates the tool’s capacity to support variable relevance assessment, dimensionality reduction, and model interpretability. Furthermore, an uncertainty-aware SHAP analysis enhances confidence in the model’s prediction stability, reinforcing the platform’s suitability for quality-driven decision support and integration into future DT ecosystems.

Abstract In recent years, growing concern about climate change and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have highlighted the role of energy efficiency and sustainability on the global agenda. Energy policies are decisive in establishing regulatory frameworks and incentives to address these challenges, leading to an inclusive and more resilient energy transition. In this context, geothermal energy is an essential source of renewable, low-emission energy, capable of providing heat and electricity sustainably. The present research focuses on a bioclimatic house’s geothermal energy system based on a heating pump and a horizontal heat exchanger. The main aim is to predict the generated thermal power of the heat pump using historical data from several sensors. In particular, two approaches were proposed with both uni-variate and multi-variate scenarios. Several deep learning techniques were applied: LSTM, GRU, 1D-CNN, CNN-LSTM, and CNN-GRU, obtaining satisfactory results over the whole dataset, which comprised one year of data acquisition. Specifically, promising results have been achieved using hybrid methods combining recurrent-based and convolutional neural networks.

Population growth has increased the demand for meat and dairy products, making livestock, especially cattle, key to meeting this demand. This has led to an increase in herd size, complicating efficient herd management. To meet this challenge, innovative technologies, such as monitoring collars, have been developed to improve individual animal management. This research work evaluates and compares three unsupervised anomaly detection methods to identify estrus in dairy cows from intensive farms, based on daily activity data recorded by a commercial monitoring collar. Data from two different dairy farms have been used and the results have been compared by evaluating the behavior both individually and at herd level. The results obtained show a good performance of the selected techniques in the individual animal models. Thus, this research demonstrates that these techniques can be very useful tools in farm management, providing valuable information, improving productivity and, consequently, increasing the economic performance of the farm.

Abstract One of the most common attacks is man‐in‐the‐middle (MitM) which, due to its complex behaviour, is difficult to detect by traditional cyber‐attack detection systems. MitM attacks on internet of things systems take advantage of special features of the protocols and cause system disruptions, making them invisible to legitimate elements. In this work, an intrusion detection system (IDS), where intelligent models can be deployed, is the approach to detect this type of attack considering network alterations. Therefore, this paper presents a novel method to develop the intelligent model used by the IDS, being this method based on a hybrid process. The first stage of the process implements a feature extraction method, while the second one applies different supervised classification techniques, both over a message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) dataset compiled by authors in previous works. The contribution shows excellent performance for any compared classification methods. Likewise, the best results are obtained using the method with the highest computational cost. Thanks to this, a functional IDS will be able to prevent MQTT attacks.

There is no doubt that the European Union is undergoing an ecological transition, with renewable energies accounting for an increasing share of energy consumption in the Member States. In Spain, solar energy is one of these rapidly expanding renewable sources. This study analyzes the solar energy production of a panel in the Spanish region of Galicia. It has been demonstrated that the solar energy produced by this panel can be predicted using a hybrid stepwise system. The missing value imputation is a key step in the process. This involves combining regression and clustering techniques on different subdivisions of the complete dataset, starting with a smaller and less complete dataset and performing appropriate imputations to create a larger and more complete collection. Finally, the dataset is divided into more relevant subsets for regression analysis to calculate the amount of solar energy generated. The imputing missing values using an Artificial Neural Network resulted in a more valid dataset for further processing than eliminating rows with corrupted or empty values. Also, properly applying clustering techniques gives better results than working on the whole dataset.

This work addresses the performance comparison between four clustering techniques with the objective of achieving strong hybrid models in supervised learning tasks. A real dataset from a bio-climatic house named Sotavento placed on experimental wind farm and located in Xermade (Lugo) in Galicia (Spain) has been collected. Authors have chosen the thermal solar generation system in order to study how works applying several cluster methods followed by a regression technique to predict the output temperature of the system. With the objective of defining the quality of each clustering method two possible solutions have been implemented. The first one is based on three unsupervised learning metrics (Silhouette, Calinski-Harabasz and Davies-Bouldin) while the second one, employs the most common error measurements for a regression algorithm such as Multi Layer Perceptron.

Abstract The significant advance of Internet of Things in industrial environments has provided the possibility of monitoring the different variables that come into play in an industrial process. This circumstance allows the supervision of the current state of an industrial plant and the consequent decision making possibilities. Then, the use of anomaly detection techniques are presented as a powerful tool to determine unexpected situations. The present research is based on the implementation of one‐class classifiers to detect anomalies in two industrial systems. The proposal is validated using two real datasets registered during different operating points of two industrial plants. To ensure a better performance, a clustering process is developed prior the classifier implementation. Then, local classifiers are trained over each cluster, leading to successful results when they are tested with both real and artificial anomalies. Validation results present in all cases, AUC values above 90%.

Abstract The devastating consequences of climate change have resulted in the promotion of clean energies, being the wind energy the one with greater potential. This technology has been developed in recent years following different strategic plans, playing special attention to wind generation. In this sense, the use of bicomponent materials in wind generator blades and housings is a widely spread procedure. However, the great complexity of the process followed to obtain this kind of materials hinders the problem of detecting anomalous situations in the plant, due to sensors or actuators malfunctions. This has a direct impact on the features of the final product, with the corresponding influence in the durability and wind generator performance. In this context, the present work proposes the use of a distributed anomaly detection system to identify the source of the wrong operation. With this aim, five different one-class techniques are considered to detect deviations in three plant components located in a bicomponent mixing machine installation: the flow meter, the pressure sensor and the pump speed.

Abstract Material flow management refers to the analysis and specific optimization of the inventory‐production system. Material flow can be characterized as the organized flow of material in a production process with the required sequence determined by a technological procedure. The Milk run system assures the transportation of materials at the right time and in an optimal manner. It should be combined with the Kanban system to highlight when something is required in the production process. This paper presents biological swarm intelligence, in general, and a particular model, particle swarm optimization (PSO), for modelling material flow using a Milk run system supported by a Kanban system in the automotive industry. The aim of this study is to create a new model for the optimal number of trailers for one train and optimal number of containers in a tugger train system when the route time period has been defined. A new modified PSO approach for integrating inventory‐production in a unique optimization model is used. The major modification to the original PSO is using the capacity of a container instead of a velocity component. Each new Kanban trigger is checked, and the total timing for the Milk run delivery solution is calculated for the necessary raw material capacity for each shop floor.

The development and integration of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) or edge computing devices is contributing to the formation of an increasingly digital, intelligent and connected world. As a result, there is a massive flow of data in different sectors of human activity. One example is intelligent buildings, where thousands of components, devices, systems and suppliers interact. In this context, failures in control and monitoring systems are frequent. To analyze this situation, this paper presents as a case study the problem of fault-tolerant robust adaptive monitoring control with state prediction performance for a class of IoT temperature systems subject to uncertainties of precision states and external disturbances. The authors propose a new control strategy based on consensus game theory and prediction of future precision states to reduce tracking error and improve algorithm efficiency. The authors present the development of a new algorithm that improves the functioning of monitoring and control of parcel networks. This has the purpose of increasing the energy efficiency of the same and ensure the effectiveness of our adaptive temperature control algorithm, compared to existing results. With the simulation presented in this research, it is possible to conclude that a new fault tolerant error tracking algorithm ensures robust monitoring of the reference model. It was shown that the predicted temperature signal is limited by a small range close to the collected temperature data. A case study result is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed fault-tolerant adaptive monitoring control algorithm.

One critical point to improve the economic and technical results of every industrial process lies on the fact of achieving a good optimization, and applying a smart maintenance plan. In this context, the tools development for detecting the appearance of any kind of anomaly represents an important challenge. For this reason, the implementation of classifiers for anomaly detection tasks has been a significant trend in the scientific community. However, since the behavior of the potential anomalies that may occur in a plant is unknown, it is necessary to generate artificial outliers to assess these classifiers. This paper proposes the performance checking of different intelligent one-class techniques to detect anomalies in an industrial plant, used to obtain the main material for wind generator blades production. These classifiers are tested using anomaly data generated, giving successful results.

Abstract This research describes a novel approach for fault detection in industrial processes, by means of unsupervised and projectionist techniques. The proposed method includes a visual tool for the detection of faults, its final aim is to optimize system performance and consequently obtaining increased economic savings, in terms of energy, material, and maintenance. To validate the new proposal, two datasets with different levels of complexity (in terms of quantity and quality of information) have been used to evaluate five well‐known unsupervised intelligent techniques. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed method, especially when the complexity of the dataset is high.

The problem of thermal fluids transfer supervision is a typical non linear process which suffers from lack of detectability when analytic model based techniques are applied on fault detection, isolation and reconfiguration tasks. This work describes the implementation of a supervision strategy to be applied on thermal fluids transfer systems for which massive neural networks based conventional functional approximation techniques associated to recursive rule based techniques on the basis of parity space approaches are applied. Results shown that diagnosis applied to fluid transfer problems can be carried out under acceptable determinism and reliability.

The self-organizing map (SOM) is a suitable algorithm for data visualization but its topological preservation makes the vector quantization non-optimal. This paper aims to improve the lack of quantization precision in the SOM. An energy cost function based on two different kernels is formulated to obtain a batch algorithm. A bivariate normal distribution is assumed to weight the topological preservation versus the vector quantization. The main properties of SOM and neural gas (NG) are combined to obtain a compact and robust learning rule with an efficient computational complexity. The proposed batch SOM-NG was compared to algorithms with procedures and computational complexities that are similar. The results seem to prove that SOM-NG can achieve an acceptable neighborhood preservation obtaining similar values to the SOM with a quantization error almost equal to the one of the NG. In this way, the algorithm has the advantages of SOM and NG for data visualization and vector quantization.

There are several successful approaches dealing with imbalanced datasets. In this paper, the Fuzzy Labeled Neural Gas (FLNG) is extended to work with this type of data. The proposed approach is based on assigning two different values in the learning rate depending on the data vector membership of the class. The technique is tested with several datasets and compared with other approaches. The results seem to prove that FLNG with different rates is a suitable tool for classification with a high degree of accuracy using g-means metric.

The research work is focused on sensors fault isolation, exploiting the synergy of functional and physical redundancy. Functional and physical redundancy is applied under a novel methodological approach to isolate individual sensor faults. The contribution uses a heuristic algorithm which combines a rule based strategy associated to a process parameter identification method to be applied on the instrumentation fault detection and isolation task. Implementation procedure is carried out on a pilot plant equipped with supervision facilities from DeltaV, state of the art software, which efficiently manage databases, rule based systems and appropriate identification support tools.