A Multi-Class Predictive Model for Manufacturing Equipment Maintenance Systems

Abstract: Unplanned equipment failures in manufacturing systems lead to production downtime, increased operational costs, and safety risks. While predictive maintenance techniques have advanced significantly, much of the existing work focuses on binary failure detection and provides limited insight into specific failure mechanisms. This paper presents a multi-class predictive modeling approach for manufacturing equipment maintenance systems that aims to identify distinct failure types using operational sensor data. The study formulates failure type prediction as an imbalanced multi-class classification problem representative of real-world industrial environments, where failure events are rare compared to normal operation. Model performance is evaluated using imbalance-aware metrics to ensure reliable assessment across both dominant and minority failure classes. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively distinguish major mechanical and thermal failure types despite severe class imbalance. These findings highlight the importance of multi-class failure prediction for enabling more targeted maintenance decisions and improving the reliability of manufacturing equipment.

Keywords: Predictive Maintenance, Multi-Class Classification, Machine Learning, Manufacturing Systems, Failure Type Prediction, Equipment Reliability