Hybrid AI Systems for Tool Wear Monitoring in Manufacturing: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Tool wear is critical to quality, productivity, and sustainability in manufacturing processes. Therefore, accurately monitoring and predicting wear is one of the primary goals of smart manufacturing systems. While AI-based approaches have achieved significant success in this area in recent years, issues such as physical inconsistency, limited generalizability, and low interpretability associated with solely data-driven methods have necessitated the development of hybrid approaches. This study systematically examines the literature published between 2020 and 2025 and comprehensively analyzes hybrid AI systems used in tool wear monitoring. Hybrid systems are categorized into four main groups: physics-based hybrids, knowledge-driven hybrids, transfer learning-based hybrids, and heterogeneous model hybrids. This classification holistically evaluates the synergistic effects and performance gains achieved by combining different methods. The findings demonstrate that the combined use of physical models, expert knowledge, and data-driven learning approaches provides significant advantages in terms of both accuracy and explainability. However, challenges such as data shortage, model complexity, and computational cost remain limitations to widespread industrial use of hybrid systems. The study demonstrates that hybrid AI systems represent a new research direction enabling the development of more reliable, transparent, and efficient solutions in smart manufacturing.