Our cooking process follows a sequence of heating, cooking, cooling, and transfer.
The total cycle duration occasionally increases, but it is not immediately clear which stage is responsible.
What is the best way in TrendMiner to automatically break the cycle into stages and determine where most delays are occurring?
For example:
Heating delay
Extended cooking period
Cooling delay
Transfer delay
Has anyone implemented a similar workflow?
Hi
The key is to keep the whole cycle as your event (so the cycle's own duration is the total), and measure each stage's duration inside that one window. TrendMiner has no direct "time spent in stage X" calculation, but there's a clean way to get it.
Total duration is just the duration of the cycle event from your cycle-identification search — you already have that.
Stage durations come from a small trick. Build a binary "stage-active" formula tag for each stage off your step tag:
HeatingActive = if(and(StepNo >= <heat start>, StepNo <= <heat end>), 1, 0)
One each for heating, cooking, cooling and transfer (make them stepped tags so they hold 0/1 cleanly). Then in Event Analytics on your cycle events, add an integral calculation of each stage-active tag over the event window. Integrating a 0/1 flag over time gives the time it spent at 1 — i.e. that stage's duration within the cycle. Set the integral's time base to minutes and it reads straight off in minutes.
Now every cycle sits on one row with five numbers: total duration plus the four stage durations. The reveal is a parallel-coordinates plot across those five axes, brush the long-total-duration cycles and watch which stage axis moves with them. A scatter of total duration vs. each stage duration works too: the stage whose points track ~1:1 with the total is your bottleneck. From there you can promote that stage's duration to a Monitor so a creeping cooling phase (or whatever it turns out to be) gets flagged early.
Kind regards
Frederik
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