Multihorizon KPI Forecasting in Complex Industrial Processes: An Adaptive Encoder–Decoder Framework With Partial Teacher Forcing

Key performance indicator (KPI) reflects the quality and efficiency of manufacturing operations, and KPI forecasting enables proper operations or controls in many industrial processes. However, existing KPI forecasting methods are inadequate for managing the advance prediction of KPI across multiple cycles effectively, which impedes precise and timely control in complex industrial processes. Therefore, we propose an adaptive encoder-decoder framework with partial teacher forcing strategy (PTF-ED) to enable flexible multihorizon KPI forecasting. First, we employ an encoder that processes the input time series and an attention layer to generate the context vectors. Then, we divide the measured KPIs into delayed and current time series, and design a delayed decoder and a current decoder in series to make the delayed and current time series correspond to the input time series. Especially, we propose a partial teacher forcing strategy to utilize the measured KPI efficiently and tackle the challenge of exposure bias in the current time series between training and inference phases. Moreover, we introduce a weighted multihorizon forecasting constraint in the model training loss to constrain the input-output correspondence across different sample intervals. The effectiveness of the proposed model has been validated through both a numerical simulation study and a case study in a real-world zinc flotation process.