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# Control of RTM processes through Deep Reinforcement Learning

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## Abstract and Figures

Resin transfer molding (RTM) is a composite manufacturing process that uses a liquid polymer matrix to create complex-shaped parts. There are several challenges associated with RTM. One of the main challenges is ensuring that the liquid polymer matrix is properly distributed throughout the composite material during the molding process. If the matrix is not evenly distributed, the resulting part may have weak or inconsistent properties. This is the challenge we tackle with the approach presented in this work. We implement an online control using deep reinforcement learning (RL) to ensure a complete impregnation of the reinforcing fibers during the injection phase, by controlling the input pressure on different inlets. This work uses this self-learning paradigm to actively control the injection of an RTM process, which has the advantage of depending on a reward function instead of a mathematical model, which would be the case for model predictive control. A reward function is more straightforward to model and can be applied and adapted to more complex problems. RL algorithms have to be trained through many iterations, for which we developed a simulation environment with a distributed and parallel architecture. We show that the presented approach decreases the failure rate from 54 % to 27 %, by 50 % compared to the same setup with steady parameters.
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Control of RTM processes through Deep
Reinforcement Learning
Simon Stieber, Leonard Heber, Christof Obertscheider, Wolfgang Reif
Institute for Software & Systems Engineering, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany
Email: {simon.stieber, leonard.heber, wolfgang.reif}@uni-a.de
Email: christof.obertscheider@fhwn.ac.at
Abstract—Resin transfer molding (RTM) is a composite man-
ufacturing process that uses a liquid polymer matrix to create
complex-shaped parts. There are several challenges associated
with RTM. One of the main challenges is ensuring that the
liquid polymer matrix is properly distributed throughout the
composite material during the molding process. If the matrix
is not evenly distributed, the resulting part may have weak or
inconsistent properties. This is the challenge we tackle with the
approach presented in this work. We implement an online control
using deep reinforcement learning (RL) to ensure a complete
impregnation of the reinforcing ﬁbers during the injection phase,
by controlling the input pressure on different inlets. This work
uses this self-learning paradigm to actively control the injection
of an RTM process, which has the advantage of depending on a
reward function instead of a mathematical model, which would
be the case for model predictive control. A reward function is
more straightforward to model and can be applied and adapted
to more complex problems. RL algorithms have to be trained
through many iterations, for which we developed a simulation
environment with a distributed and parallel architecture. We
show that the presented approach decreases the failure rate from
54 % to 27 %, by 50 % compared to the same setup with steady
parameters.
Index Terms—Reinforcement Learning, Resin Transfer Mold-
ing, Control
I. INT ROD UC TI ON T O RTM AND CONTROL
Fiber-reinforced plastics (FRP) are a composite material,
whereby conventional plastics are raised to a higher mechani-
cal level by the introduction of reinforcing ﬁbers. Components,
especially when reinforced with carbon ﬁber, are very light
and can withstand large forces in the direction of the ﬁbers.
These properties can be exploited to save weight and increase
stiffness compared to conventional components made of steel
or aluminum [1]. Further, they render this material especially
interesting for the aviation and automotive industry since
weight savings lead to lower energy consumption, and thus
FRP are a key to a more environmentally friendly mobility.
The RTM process (resin transfer molding) [2] is a widely
used industrial process for manufacturing such components.
Characteristic is the usage of a closed mold whose shape
resembles the ﬁnal part. The ﬁbers are used in form of a textile,
which for example can be woven. Multiple layers of textile can
stacked to build a textile preform, which is placed in the mold.
Next, a liquid polymer matrix, i.e. the resin, is injected into
the mold via several sprues. After the resin has cured, the part
can be removed from the mold. Usually the process is carried
out in a intransparent mold. This makes it easier to construct
the mold, because it has to withstand high pressures during the
resin injection. Yet, especially in experimental work, it can be
desirable to visually track the resin ﬂow. Other approaches and
processes, including the usage of transparent mold and sensor
arrays, will be presented in Section II.
During the injection of the resin, disturbances that stem
from the irregular nature of the textile can occur that lead
to an incomplete impregnation of the textile, which reduces
the stability of the manufactured component. This leads to
a high reject rate, which can make the production of FRP
components uneconomical and unecological. The border be-
tween already impregnated areas and dry areas is called the
to an air entrapment in the worst case, which is called a
dry spot. By controlling the pressure at which the resin is
injected into the mold, the ﬂow front can be inﬂuenced in
order to ensure a uniform, complete and fast impregnation
of the textile. One difﬁculty in designing such a controller is
the nonlinear and complex relationship between the injection
pressure and the spreading of the resin [3]. This complicates
the classical expert-based controller design, which is based on
the formation of a mathematical model of the controlled sys-
tem. Therefore, data-driven approaches using various machine
learning models have been developed in related work [3]–
[5]. Initial successes have been achieved, resulting in a more
In this work, we use Reinforcement Learning (RL) to
optimize the injection pressure in an RTM process. A system
trained by an RL algorithm is called an agent. This agent
learns to interact with its environment through trial and error.
In doing so, it is driven by rewards it receives in response to
its actions, which it tries to maximize [6]. The experiments
for this work were performed using a simulation of the RTM
process. Running a real machine would be too expensive
and burdensome to perform the number of runs necessary
to train the algorithms. In addition, a distributed and parallel
architecture was implemented to take advantage of available
computational resources during training. The overall approach
1
Fig. 1. Overview of our setup: The agent receives an observation and a reward and chooses an action. The simulation acts as the environment which takes
the action and returns the next observation, containing the ﬂow front image, the ﬁber volume content (FVC) map, and the pressure image.
is depicted in Fig. 1.
II. RE LATE D WOR K
Previous work on the optimization of the RTM process can
be divided into passive and active methods. Passive methods
are used to optimize various process parameters in advance,
with no further inﬂuence being exerted during ongoing pro-
duction. Szarski et al. [7] used RL to optimize ﬂuid ﬂow in a
process similar to RTM by determining the placement of ﬂow
enhancers a priori.
The active, or online, methods are applied during the process
to control certain parameters based on real-time measurements.
Thus, unforeseen disturbances can be reacted to. The approach
of this work can be classiﬁed as an active method, where the
measurement is an image of the ﬂow front, inter alia, and the
variable to be controlled, the actuator, is the pressure proﬁle
applied to the resin inlets. Demirci and Coulter [4] trained
an artiﬁcial neural network using a numerical simulation to
predict the ﬂow front position at the next discrete time step
from the ﬂow front and the injection pressure. They deﬁned
an optimal ﬂow front as the control target. The output of the
controller is the pressure proﬁle that minimizes the difference
between the ﬂow front position predicted by the model and
the predeﬁned target ﬂow front. To determine this pressure
proﬁle, they tested several optimization methods, of which the
Downhill Simplex method of Nelder and Mead [8] proved to be
the most efﬁcient [9]. Nielsen and Pitchumani also trained an
artiﬁcial neural network to predict the future ﬂuid advancement
by using a numerical simulation [10]. To determine the optimal
pressure proﬁle, they used the Simulated Annealing method,
a heuristic optimization procedure [11]. In another work, they
extended their model to include a fuzzy logic estimate of the
permeability of the textile [12]. In real experimental setups,
the resulting ﬂow front was found to sufﬁciently approximate
the desired one. Wang et al. [3] designed a model predictive
controller (MPC) with a ﬂow front speciﬁcation. They use an
autoregressive model with exogenous input (ARX) to account
for the nonlinear characteristics of the RTM process. The
parameters of the model can be identiﬁed online, i.e. at run-
time, by a recursive least squares method. The controller was
tested on a rectangular plate component, with an additional
textile layer added to create an obstacle to the ﬂow front. A
response to the disturbance was evident in the applied pressure
proﬁles. Those works have in common that they measure the
performance of their approach by measuring the difference of
the actual ﬂow front from an optimal ﬂow front, which would
be a perpendicular line in the linear injection from one side
case.
Our work differs from those approaches because model-free
RL approximates functions that map measured values directly
to the next action. Therefore, no model of the process is needed
and no elaborate optimization needs to be performed at each
step. Further, we do not use the straightness of the ﬂow front
as a metric per se, but we optimize to reduce dry spots and
thus reduce the failure rate of the process. The form of the
ﬂow front is a factor in our proposed reward function (cf.
Section IV-C).
Another area of research concerning the RTM process is
online monitoring and analysis. The goal is to obtain as much
information as possible about the running process, even though
it takes place in a closed tool, in order to perform analysis and
optimization. In the implementation of this work, such issues
were rather secondary, since the approach is tested exclusively
in a simulative environment. However, since the motivation
of this work is real-world implementation, a number of pa-
pers dealing with this are presented here. Stieber et al. [13]
developed a concept for building an RTM process, where a
digital twin of the process could be implemented by using a
variety of different sensors and a simulation. The focus was the
in-situ monitoring, using for example pressure sensors inside
the mold. In another work [14], coarse pressure sensor data
providing binary information about the ﬂow front progression
at certain points within the mold was used to generate images
of the ﬂow front using machine learning models, which are
directly obtainable, since the tooling is intransparent. Those
images were then analyzed for the occurrence of dry spots,
with the goal of reducing the average cycle time of the process
by stopping faulty runs as early as possible. Other works [12],
2
[15]–[17] focused on the prediction of the material properties
from the resin ﬂow to build additional information on the
process and the ﬁnished product. Gr¨
ossing et al. [18] assessed
how well different simulation programs can reproduce the
resin ﬂow behavior of the RTM process. For comparison with
reality, they used a setup in which the upper half of the mold
is transparent. This allowed pictures of the ﬂow front to be
taken with a camera.
III. RL MET HO DS
RL is a paradigm of machine learning that involves an agent
that learns by interacting with an environment and receiving
feedback in the form of rewards or penalties. The goal is
to learn an optimal policy, which is a mapping of states
to actions that will maximize the reward over a series of
interactions. A sequence of interactions is called a trajectory or
if it is of ﬁnite length, an episode. RL algorithms deﬁne how
experienced state transitions are used to improve the agent’s
policy and can roughly be classiﬁed into two groups: model-
based and model-free methods. The algorithms employed here,
A2C and PPO belong to the model free methods, learning
policies solely from experienced state transitions and received
rewards while having no prior knowledge of the environment’s
dynamics nor trying to model them. Actor critic RL algorithms
combine two early model-free approaches, the value-based
and the policy-based methods. Value-based methods seek to
estimate the long-term value of states, which reduces the
task of ﬁnding optimal action sequences to choosing the
action immediately yielding the highest value. In policy-based
methods, the goal is to approximate a policy function that
maps states to actions. One way to achieve this is the usage of
expression describing the inﬂuence of an action on the received
rewards. This enables the use of gradient descent methods
to optimize the policy function based on experienced trajec-
tories. Actor-critic algorithms simultaneously train a policy
and a value function. The prediction of a state’s long-term
value is used to optimize the policy. This leads to a higher
sample efﬁciency and better convergence properties [19]. The
usage of deep neural networks to approximate those functions
makes those methods viable for complex real-world problems,
because it enables them to interact with high-dimensional
observations, like images, and to cope with nonlinear policies.
They are called deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods
accordingly.
Advantage actor-critic (A2C) [20] implements the actor-
critic pattern by using the advantage function as the critic. The
taking a certain action in a certain state. By optimizing the
policy with respect to the advantage estimate, the probability
to take actions, that lead to high rewards, rises.
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) [21] works similarly to
A2C, but introduces a surrogate objective to replace the simple
advantage estimate. It has been found that too large policy
updates can cause instabilities. That led to the development
of trust-region methods that limit the policy update per step,
which results in a more monotonic improvement [22]. PPO
uses a clipping mechanism, which is more efﬁcient, easier to
implement, and broader applicable than former trust region
methods.
IV. EXP ER IM EN TS
In the following the experimental setup including the sim-
ulation, the RL controller and RL hyperparameters, and the
actual experiment plan are described.
A. Simulative Environment
For our application, as it is common for DRL models, train-
ing in s real-world setup is not feasible, since a large number
of iterations are required, which would result in many costly
experiments. Therefore we used a numerical simulation of
the resin ﬂow to provide a simulative environment resembling
the RTM process. Existing simulation programs didn’t match
our requirements, so we implemented a simulation based on
RTMSim [23]. The resin ﬂow through a porous medium, i.e.
a textile can be described with Darcy’s law, which deﬁnes the
ﬂow speed as shown in equation 1.
v=K
η· p(1)
pdenotes the pressure gradient between two points, K
describes the permeability of the textile and ηis the viscosity
of the resin. To be able to execute comparable experiments,
Their values were chosen to be constant within realistic
magnitudes but would vary, if, for example, other types of
resin or textile were used. We assume ηto be 0,1Pas and K
to be isotropic, meaning its value is the same in every ﬂow
direction. The exact value of Kis varied between experiments
and will be explained later on.
RTMSim applies a ﬁnite area method to solve the resin ﬂow
on the whole part, which introduces the need for temporal and
spatial discretization. While the simulation requires compara-
bly small time steps to yield numerically stable solutions, we
chose a much larger step size of 0,5s - or a frequency of 2Hz
- for the RL cycle. This reduces the computational burden,
which is necessary to efﬁciently train agents. Therefore, per
RL step, a multitude of simulation steps is executed. In the
spatial domain, we use a mesh that consists of 1878 triangle
elements and models a planar quadratic part, as depicted
in Fig. 2. The part has a side length of 50 cm and a thickness
of 0.5cm. Three equally wide and independently controllable
resin inlets are placed on the left side. In order to simulate
irregularities in the textile preform and provoke perturbations
of the ﬂow front, inserts are placed on the part. An insert
is an area whose ﬁber volume content (FVC) - and thus the
permeability - deviates from the standard value, which we
chose to be 35 %, which leads to Kequals 1,464 ×109m2
in the basic textile. In related work, it has become common to
use rectangular inserts to provoke and analyze perturbations of
the ﬂow front [3], [14]. The position, the dimension, and the
degree of FVC deviation determine how hard the control task
3
0 10 20 30 40 50
Length in cm
0
10
20
30
40
50
Width in cm
Inlet 1
Inlet 2
Inlet 3
Inlet Cells
0 10 20 30 40 50
Length in cm
0
10
20
30
40
50
Width in cm
FVC Values
Fig. 2. Left: Three different inlet cell groups that can be actuated indepen-
dently are depicted in different colors. Right: FVC contents in different areas
of the preform. Patch with higher FVC.
is. During training, the placement is drawn from a random
distribution, which is subject to certain constraints in each
experiment that will be explained in section IV-E.
Special requirements, that defer from commonly used sim-
ulation tools such as PAM RTM [24] are the possibility to
change the injection pressure and obtain the state of the
simulation at any point in simulated time. This ability is crucial
for online control and needs to be possible without terminating
the executing process to achieve high efﬁciency and stability.
We created a lightweight program by stripping down the
implementation of RTMSim to the speciﬁc case we need to
simulate. This enabled us to run multiple parallel instances of
the simulation on a multi-node compute cluster. Distributed on
9 servers our architecture can provide 279 virtual instances of
the RTM process for an agent to train with while using one
additional server for mid-training validation. A training run
consists of 2,000,000 steps, which took on average 5hours
and 29 minutes, including validation. This equals 60,000 to
100,000 ﬁlling cycles for agents to gain experience from,
depending on the average episode length of each experiment.
B. RL Controller
The agent interacts with all parallel environments in a
synchronous manner and the experiences are batched and
accumulated via stochastic gradient descent. The interaction
with every single environment is similar to how an agent would
be integrated into the RTM process as a controller, as can be
shown in Fig. 1. At each discrete step the agent receives an
observation and chooses an action. The action consists of three
integer values that control the injection pressure at the three
resin inlets, which can be set to ﬁve discrete equidistant levels
between 0,1and 5bar.
We experimented with three different observation spaces to
evaluate which physical quantities yield the most value for
the agent. The considered quantities are the ﬁlling state, the
preform FVC and the pressure inside the tool. The ﬁlling
state represents the spreading of the resin, which is to be
optimized and therefore included. The ﬂow speed and thus
the ﬂow front is, as stated by Darcy’s law, inﬂuenced by
the permeability and the pressure gradient. We substitute the
permeability information with the FVC of the textile, as it is
usually easier to obtain in real-world scenarios and, according
to our assumptions regarding the textile, the only factor inﬂu-
we provide the agents with a simple map of the pressure inside
the mold, which is, again, more realistic to measure in a real
process. In our simulation, all of those quantities are observed
as 50 ×50 pixel grayscale images that display their spatial
distribution. While the FVC remains constant throughout one
ﬁlling cycle, the ﬁlling state and pressure evolve with time.
The simplest observation space containing only the ﬂow front
image is from now on called Ff, adding the FVC map gives
the observation space FfFvc and adding the pressure image
A ﬁlling cycle consists of a series of interactions and ends
when one terminal condition is fulﬁlled. This can be either the
occurrence of a dry spot or the complete ﬁlling of the part,
each of which will trigger a speciﬁc reward signal contributing
to the reward function described in Section IV-C. A ﬁlling
cycle deﬁnitely terminates in ﬁnite time, rendering this case
an episodic problem in terms of RL. During training, ﬁnished
simulation instances are automatically reset with randomized
initial conditions concerning the preform FVC and thus the
permeability, as described in section IV-A.
C. Reward Function
We designed a reward function that depends on the ﬂow
front image only. The main purpose of our reward function
(Eq. (2)) is to reward the complete ﬁlling of the part and
punish the occurrence of dry spots.
r(o) = a·ﬁlled
nsteps
b·dryspot
c·1
h·R·
R2
X
i=1
h
X
j=1
(Ri)·(1 oi,j )2(2)
ﬁlled and dryspot take either values of 0or 1and indicate if
the respective event has occurred. Both can only be triggered
in terminal states because the environments automatically reset
in either case. The input to the reward function is the ﬂow front
image o, while the notation oi,j refers to the pixel in the i-th
row and j-th column. his the height of o, which is 50 in our
experiments, and Ris the column index of the rightmost pixel
that has been reached by the resin. nsteps counts the number
of steps elapsed since the beginning of the episode and the
weighting factors have been chosen as a= 3000,b= 100 and
c= 10 in prior experiments. In an episode of usual length -
when nsteps is around 30 - the choice of aand bcauses the
ﬁrst two terms to be of the same magnitude.
Apart from the sparse reward mechanism, which only yields
a signal - either positive or negative - in terminal states, we
added an auxiliary goal to guide the agent to the desired
behavior. This introduces the third term, which measures the
ﬂow front uniformity. In our setup, the optimal ﬂow front
would be an orthogonal line moving from left to right. When
4
evaluating the reward function, we place this target ﬂow front
at R. Then the mean squared error between oand this target,
weighted with each pixel’s distance to R, is calculated, with
the exception that the two columns nearest to the target line
are excluded. Thereby, small irregularities have a comparably
small impact on the reward signal, whereas deeper bulges are
weighted quadratically higher. This motivates the agent to keep
the ﬂow front as even as possible, which is a good step toward
preventing dry spots.
Two mechanisms implicitly add the incentive to ﬁnish
episodes quickly. By weighting filled inversely with nsteps,
the agent receives a higher reward at the end of short episodes.
Because the deviation from the target ﬂow front is weighted
negatively, the reward signal is negative for all states, except
for possibly a terminal one. In order to maximize the rewards
accumulated over an episode, the agent should ﬁnish the
episode in as few steps as possible, while still seeking to ﬁll
the part completely by avoiding dry spots.
D. RL Parameters
We used the package stable-baselines3 [25], which, inter
alia, provides implementations of A2C and PPO with pre-
tuned hyperparameters1. We adjusted the parameter n_steps
to 20, which sets the number of steps to include per policy
update. This improved the agents’ performance, while for the
other parameters, no changes were found to be beneﬁcial.
Regarding the neural network trained by the algorithms, we
used the same architecture in all experiments. Parts of the
network are shared between the policy and the value function.
The shared part consists of three convolutional layers followed
by a feed forward layer of width 128. The ﬁrst convolutional
layer uses 32 kernels of size 8×8with stride 4, the second 64
kernels of size 4×4with stride 2, and the third 64 kernels of
size 3×3with stride 1. This convolutional network architecture
was used by Mnih et al. [20] in an inﬂuential work on the
application of DRL and an implementation is provided by
stable-baselines3. Next, the network splits into two heads, each
containing a feed forward layer of width 32. The output of the
policy contains three values and represents the action of the
agent, while the value network predicts one value. In all layers,
ReLU [26] is used as activation function and Adam [27] as
optimizer.
E. Series of experiments
Two series of experiments are presented in this paper. Each
series contains six experiments resulting from combining the
three possible observation spaces with the two considered
algorithms. During training, the insert parameters are drawn
from experiment-speciﬁc random distributions, which will be
explained in this section. To be able to compare agents within
one series of experiments, we evaluate them on test sets of 100
parts, that were created according to the same distribution as
used in training.
1The standard hyperparameters of A2C: https://stable-baselines3.
TABLE I
SET UP OF S LI GHT P ERTU RBAT ION S AN D STRO NG P ERTU RBATI ON S.
Slight Pert. Strong Pert.
# and shape of insert 1Rect. 1Rect.
Height of insert in cm 21 ±1 15 ±1
Width of insert in cm 16 ±1 15 ±1
FVC preform in % 35 35
Perm. preform in m21,464 ×1091,464 ×109
FVC patch in % 42 45
Perm. patch in m23,969 ×1010 2,268 ×1010
% dry spots 0 54
In the ﬁrst set of experiments inserts are placed and varied
in such a way that slight perturbations of the ﬂow front occur
when injecting the ﬂuid with steady pressure. Thus, the ﬂow
front lags behind signiﬁcantly when it passes an insert, but no
dry spots are formed. Rectangular inserts of height 21 ±1cm
and width 16 ±1cm are used for this purpose. The setup
of both experimental campaigns, especially the differences
are presented in Table I. These are placed randomly on the
component with the restriction that a strip of 5cm width is
excluded from each of the left and right edges. The FVC of the
insert is 42 %, which equals a permeability of 3,969 ×1010
m2. The results are presented in section V-A.
In the second series of experiments, strong perturbations, up
to the formation of dry spots, were provoked. In preliminary
tests, agents tended to have greater control of the ﬂow front in
the ﬁrst third of the part than in areas far from the resin inlets.
This can be explained by Darcy’s law, according to which the
ﬂow velocity is proportional to the pressure gradient. Close
to the inlets, this can be strong and immediately changed
by applying different pressure values, while the inﬂuence
decreases when the ﬂow front is farther away. Therefore the
inserts are placed only in the left third of the part to test
whether an agent of RL is in principle able to prevent the
formation of dry spots. The inserts are of square shape and
have a side length of 15 ±1cm. The inserts have a FVC of
45 % and a permeability of 2,268 ×1010 m2. They were
placed 5cm from the inlets and 15 cm from the outlets,
since perturbations closer to the inlets made it possible to still
change the ﬂow front sufﬁciently. Additionally, a 5cm margin
is applied to the upper and lower edge to avoid cases where
a dry spot touches a border.
An uncontrolled injection process leads to strong irregular-
ities of the ﬂow front as soon as it reaches an insert. In 54
% of the cases within the test set, this ultimately leads to the
formation of a dry spot, causing ﬁlling cycle to be prematurely
terminated. It is noteworthy that the difference between slight
and strong perturbations is only 3% in FVC. The amount of
change in FVC necessary to provoke enclosures of dry textile,
i.e. dry spots was determined experimentally. The results of
these experiments are described in section V-B.
V. R ES ULTS
In the following chapter, the results of these two series of
experiments are presented to assess whether RL can provide
5
TABLE II
RES ULTS F ROM EX PE RIM EN TS WI TH S LIG HT P ERTU RBATI ON S.
Algorithm /
Observation Space
Mean Reward
per Episode
Mean Length
Uncontrolled 107.829.52
PPO/Ff 51.2 30.59
A2C/Ff 110.2 29.77
PPO/FfFvc 23.2 31.53
A2C/FfFvc 126.5 29.96
PPO/FfFvcP 22.232.84
A2C/FfFvcP 76.7 32.55
an advantage in controlling the RTM process.
A common metric in RL applications is the average accumu-
lated reward per episode [6]. Another measure is the average
number of steps per episode, i.e., how long a ﬁlling cycle
takes on average. The duration in seconds is given by half
the number of steps. From an economic point of view, it is
desirable to achieve the shortest possible cycle time of the
RTM process. However, very short episodes can also mean
that ﬁlling cycles were aborted early because a dry spot was
detected. Therefore, when considering the episode length, the
speciﬁc data set must be analyzed to determine whether and
how often dry spots occur. In such cases, the adjusted average
episode length can be used, which considers only successful
ﬁlling cycles. In addition, if dry spots occur in the data set
used for evaluation, the rate of failed episodes can be used.
While this information is implicitly included in the cumulative
rewards, since the occurrence of a dry spot is penalized by
the reward function, the reward signals are also inﬂuenced by
other factors. Therefore, it may be advantageous to explicitly
calculate the dry spot rate, which, in this formulation, shall
be minimized. By comparing the strategies, it is possible
to evaluate which algorithm gives the best result in which
conﬁguration, but there is no indication of whether an overall
advantage can be obtained for the control of the RTM process.
Therefore, the learned strategies are additionally compared
with a constant baseline strategy that applies the maximum
possible injection pressure of 5bar to each gate in each step.
This corresponds to the uncontrolled version of the RTM
process commonly employed industrially [1].
A. Slight perturbations
In this series of experiments, minor disturbances of the
ﬂow front occur during an uncontrolled injection due to slight
perturbations of the preform permeability. Table II shows
the average rewards per episode and the average episode
lengths resulting from the different pairings of algorithms and
observation spaces.
For comparison, the values obtained by an uncontrolled
injection are given. Since no dry spots occur in this setup, the
rate of dry spots is not used as a metric. The average episode
length, on the other hand, is used as a quality measure of
an agent without restriction, since episodes are not terminated
prematurely and shorter episodes are desirable. Based on the
metrics shown in Table II on the test data set, it can be
seen that PPO is better suited for this use case than A2C.
While PPO agents achieve a higher average reward than the
uncontrolled injection process in all conﬁgurations, the FVC
agent achieves a signiﬁcantly higher reward, while adding the
pressure information provides only a marginal advantage. In
contrast, agents trained by A2C only manage to learn a strategy
that can achieve an advantage over the uncontrolled process
noticeable that agents achieving higher rewards usually take
longer to complete an episode. To reach an even ﬂow front,
the agent has to match the ﬂow speed in higher permeability
areas to the lower speed that is possible when impregnating
the lower permeability inserts, which causes the ﬁlling cycle
to take longer in general. On the contrary, agents behaving
similarly to the uncontrolled process are also nearly as fast.
These observations are illustrated below by comparing two
differently trained agents. In Fig. 3, the behaviors of the
PPO/Ff agent and the PPO/FfFvcP agent are compared. For
this purpose, three snapshots of two ﬁlling processes, resulting
from applying the respective control strategies to the same test
case, are shown. The agent PPO/FfFvcP has an advantage due
to its knowledge of the local FVC since it can preemptively
steer against ﬂow front disturbances that will happen in later
process stages. In the beginning, agent PPO/FfFvcP applies
the maximum possible value of 5bar relatively constant to
gate 3, while gradually lower values are selected for gate 2
an gate 1. This is displayed in the action plot in Fig. 3. As
a result, the image taken after 1s shows a curvature towards
the insert. This causes a negative reward signal, as can be
read from the reward plot. When passing the insert, the ﬂow
front is slightly delayed and is subsequently almost straight.
In consequence, the reward signals received per step are
nearly zero and the cumulative rewards remain almost constant
until the positive signal for ﬁnishing the episode successfully
is triggered. Towards the end of the ﬁlling process, there
are clear ﬂuctuations in the actions of agent PPO/FfFvcP,
but these have little inﬂuence on the ﬂow front since it is
already far away from the resin inlets. Agent PPO/Ff, in
contrast, can only react to disturbances in the ﬂow front that
have already occurred. Since the process reacts sluggishly to
changes in the injection pressure, especially when the ﬂow
only slight advantages over the uncontrolled process. Agent
PPO/Ff tries to create a straight ﬂow front from the beginning
by applying uniform, high-pressure values. However, already
after 1s a slight disturbance can be seen since the ﬂow front
has already reached the insert. The agent reacts to this by
slightly reducing the pressure at gate 1, which is diagonally
opposite to the disturbance. However, this does not prevent
the ﬂow front from progressing signiﬁcantly faster on the
upper half of the image. After achieving quite good rewards
in the beginning, the cumulative reward drops deeply due to
the irregularity of the ﬂow front.
The comparison shows that agent PPO/FfFvcP is able to
act far-sighted due to its additional information and accepts
6
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 78 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
Time in s
0
2
4
Pressure in bar
Actions
PPO/Ff, Inlet 1
PPO/Ff, Inlet 2
PPO/Ff, Inlet 3
PPO/FfFvcP, Inlet 1
PPO/FfFvcP, Inlet 2
PPO/FfFvcP, Inlet 3
t=1s
PPO/Ff
t=7s t=14s
t=1s
PPO/FfFvcP
t=7s t=14s
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 78 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
Time in s
400
200
0
Reward
Accumulated Rewards
PPO/Ff
PPO/FfFvcP
Fig. 3. The comparison of the control strategies of agents PPO/Ff and PPO/FfFvcP, using three snapshots. The local FVC of the textile can be seen transparently
in the ﬂow front images, with the insert with lower FVC being darker. In addition, the evolution of the cumulative rewards up to the respective time point,
as well as the evolution of the pressure values at the individual gates representing the agents’ actions, were visualized.
7
suboptimal results in the beginning in order to achieve better
ones in the long run. Agent PPO/Ff, on the other hand,
makes optimal decisions at the beginning, but since it does
not know where the insert is located, it falls behind in terms
of cumulative rewards after only a few steps.
In conclusion, it is possible for RL agents to learn strategies
that perform better than an uncontrolled injection in terms of
the reward function and in the presence of minor disturbances.
its strategy. Especially the FVC map makes a big difference
because it allows the agent to steer preemptively against future
disturbances.
B. Strong perturbations
In this series of experiments, the insert placement and
the level of permeability perturbation cause either strong
irregularities of the ﬂow front or even result in the formation
of a dry spot. During an uncontrolled resin injection, 54% of
the test cases were terminated early due to the detection of
a dry spot. First, general observations from this experimental
campaign are discussed and subsequently, one example run is
described.
Table III lists the results obtained when training the six
pairings of algorithms and observation spaces. The metric of
average cumulative rewards per episode is of limited use. First,
the rewards obtained are generally lower than in the ﬁrst exper-
iment, which can be explained by the stronger perturbations of
the ﬂow front. Second, within this experiment, the PPO agents
can generate higher rewards than the A2C agents, but in doing
so there appears to be no relationship to the rate of dry spots.
Third, the A2C agents receive signiﬁcantly lower rewards on
average, in particular even less than the uncontrolled injection.
Nonetheless, agent A2C/FfFvcP is the most successful in terms
of preventing dry spots.
Also, the mean length cannot be used unambiguously to
compare strategies. The uncontrolled process requires the
fewest steps per episode, this is because over half of the
test cases are terminated prematurely, which usually occurs
between step 10 and step 15. The conclusion that longer
episodes indicate better agent behavior is also incorrect. Agent
A2C/FfFvc stands out, producing comparatively long episodes
but still having a similar dry spot rate as, e.g., PPO/FfFvc,
whose episodes are on average about 9steps shorter. Thus,
the episodes of A2C/FfFvc are not longer because it prevents
more dry spots and thus leads more episodes to successful
completion, but because the strategy of A2C/FfFvc chooses
comparatively low-pressure values, causing the ﬂow front to
progress slower and the episodes to last longer. This has
been found in graphical evaluations of the strategy but is
not explicitly shown here by ﬁgures for reasons of space and
relevance. Therefore, Table III reports the mean length cleared
of episodes that have been stopped early as adjusted mean
length.
Due to the occurrence of dry spots, the dry spot rate is used
as a metric in this experiment. This has the advantage that
preventing dry spots corresponds to a real advantage, while
TABLE III
RES ULTS F ROM EX PE RIM EN TS WI TH S TRO NG PE RTUR BATI ONS .
Algorithm
/ Observa-
tion Space
Mean
Reward per
Episode
Mean
Length
Dry
Spot
Rate
Length
Uncontrolled 157.421.15 54% 24.91
PPO/Ff 163.9 23.72 40% 29.27
A2C/Ff 322.8 29.27 41% 35.76
PPO/FfFvc 132.820.82 37% 24.95
A2C/FfFvc 275.1 29.37 39% 35.61
PPO/FfFvcP 138.5 22.67 34% 26.64
A2C/FfFvcP 221.5 23.82 27% 26.82
the rewards obtained are subject to the assumptions of the
reward function.
All agents achieve a better dry spot rate than the uncon-
trolled process. The trend is that, as in the ﬁrst series of
results, which means lower dry spot rates in this case. In
contrast to the ﬁrst series of experiments, the best agents
do not show major disadvantages in terms of ﬁlling speed,
yet the uncontrolled process is still the fastest. This becomes
apparent when considering the dry spot rate and the adjusted
mean length together, which shows that agents that can prevent
the most dry spots still have a comparatively high ﬁlling
speed. There is no clear trend between the two algorithms,
in particular, an agent trained by A2C performs best.
Fig. 4 shows a comparison of the best agent A2C/FfFvcP
and the uncontrolled injection, in which the latter leads to the
formation of a dry spot.
The actions of the uncontrolled agent are plotted in the
action graph for comparison, with the maximum value of
5bar applied to all inlets at all times. The learned strategy
also behaves almost constantly. At inlet 2, which is on the
horizontal line of the insert, 5bar is applied, while the value
at the two outer inlets is reduced to half: 2.5bar. Due to the
overall lower injection pressure, the regulated ﬂow front moves
slightly slower than the uncontrolled one. In the snapshots,
although both ﬂow fronts are approximately equally advanced,
there are 1,5s between each. The uncontrolled ﬂow front
advances rapidly at the edges of the component so that the part
delayed by the lower permeability of the insert lags behind.
As soon as the advancing arms of the ﬂow front have passed
the insert, they close up again because the textile has a higher
permeability there and is penetrated more quickly. The delayed
region of the ﬂow front is so far behind that the insert is not
completely impregnated before the ﬂow front closes behind
it. Thus, air entrapment occurs and the episode is aborted.
This can also be seen in the reward graph in Fig. 4, as a
strong negative reward signal is triggered after 6,5s. The
controlled ﬂow front moves slower, especially at the edges
of the component. Although a slight advance on both sides of
the insert cannot be prevented, the resin has almost completely
penetrated the insert when the two arms merge, as can be seen
in the snapshot after 6,5s. Thus, a dry spot does not form
and the ﬁlling process can be completed.
8
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 78 9 10 11 12
Time in s
0
2
4
Pressure in bar
Actions
Comp., Inlet 1
Comp., Inlet 2
Comp., Inlet 3
A2C/FfFvcP, Inlet 1
A2C/FfFvcP, Inlet 2
A2C/FfFvcP, Inlet 3
t = 3.5 s
Comp.
t=5s t=6.5s
t=5s
A2C/FfFvcP
t=6.5s t=8s
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 78 9 10 11 12
Time in s
200
0
Reward
Accumulated Rewards
Comp.
A2C/FfFvcP
Fig. 4. Snapshots from a ﬁlling cycle with strong perturbations controlled by A2C/FfFvcP. An uncontrolled injection (Comp.) is depicted as a comparison.
In this experiment, it could be shown that RL algorithms
can learn control strategies that reduce the dry spot rate of the
simulated RTM process. In doing so, they do not necessarily
have a disadvantage in ﬁlling speed. When provided with
perturbations and thus achieve better results.
VI. CONCLUSION AND OU TL OO K
In this work, we showed that RL for the RTM process is pos-
sible and yields better results than an uncontrolled or steadily
parameterized process. Another advantage of the presented
approach is that a mathematical model of the process is not
needed, which is the case for MPC. Through massive parallel
computation, we made it possible to train our RL models in
appropriate timing boundaries. We adapted and used a ﬁnite-
volume simulation that had all the necessary properties for
RL, such as interrupting and re-parameterizing processes on
the ﬂy, which is not the case for most commercial simulation
software. Our approach is currently constrained to a subset of
RTM processes and can be adjusted to other setups. For that,
9
the simulation of the process needs to be adapted and possibly
the reward function needs to be adjusted, depending on the
form and other properties of the product. For an application
in the real world, with an RTM machine, several steps would
need to be taken. If a component of the same shape and size
we discussed in the paper would be the goal, a machine with
inlet gates that can be adjusted during the process and also a
monitoring system, that shows ﬂow front (e.g. as shown by
Stieber et al. [14]) and pressure ﬁeld of the process would be
necessary. Another way to apply this method to a real-world
process would be to use a Vacuum Assisted Resin Infusion
(VARI) process that usually works with a transparent vacuum
bag as the top half of the mold. Here, the ﬂow front is always
visible and thus needs not be obtained through sensors. For
the pressure ﬁeld, pressure sensors would be necessary in both
cases. After determining the process to use, a model trained
with a matching simulation could be used with our method and
then be re-trained to the real process, making this a Sim-to-
Real Transfer Learning [28] approach. Reshaping the reward
function would be necessary for most new applications of
this method. E.g. other geometries with desired ﬂow fronts
of different shape. Additionally, effects such as race-tracking
[16], [29], that happen in real-world scenarios, need to be
considered to adjust the ﬂow-front part of the reward function
for real processes. Another aspect that could be presented in
future work is the use of additional actuators, such as vents,
which could yield even better results through a wider range
of actuation of the process.
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