A comprehensive review for industrial applicability of artificial neural networks

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the industrial applications of artificial neural networks (ANNs), in the last 12 years. Common questions that arise to practitioners and control engineers while deciding how to use NNs for specific industrial tasks are answered. Workable issues regarding implementation details, training and performance evaluation of such algorithms are also discussed, based on a judiciously chronological organization of topologies and training methods effectively used in the past years. The most popular ANN topologies and training methods are listed and briefly discussed, as a reference to the application engineer. Finally, ANN industrial applications are grouped and tabulated by their main functions and what they actually performed on the referenced papers. The authors prepared this paper bearing in mind that an organized and normalized review would be suitable to help industrial managing and operational personnel decide which kind of ANN topology and training method would be adequate for their specific problems. Index Terms--Architecture, industrial control, neural network (NN) applications, training.