Artificial Immune Systems in Industrial Applications

Artificial Immune System (AIS) is a new intelligent problem-solving technique that being used in some industrial applications. This paper presents such an immunity-based algorithm for tool breakage detection. The method is inspired by the negative-selection mechanism of the immune system, which is able to discriminate between the self (body elements) and the non-self (foreign pathogens). However, in our industrial application, the self is defined to be normal cutting operation and the non-self is any deviation beyond allowable variation of the cutting force. The proposed algorithm is illustrated with a simulation study of milling operations and the performance of the algorithm in detecting the occurrence of tool breakage is reported. The results show that the negative-selection algorithm detected tool breakage in all the test cases.