An intelligent real-time decision support system for process control in electronics assembly

A printed circuit board (PCB) assembly is the major process in electronics manufacturing. Compared with other types of manufacturing processes, the PCB assembly process consists of several complex steps that have strong interrelationships with each other and a large number of components are assembled on PCBs. Due to the complicated processes and lack of human expertise in this area, an intelligent real-time decision support system for process control in PCB assembly is presented for reducing possible process faults and improving productivity.;These five modules form a framework of a customized decision support system. A computer system has been successfully implemented by using MS Visual BASIC in the MS-Windows environment. The system has also been verified and validated and the results are satisfactory.;The designed system consists of five modules: (1) a statistical process control module that recognizes the patterns of situations of "out of control," (2) an inference engine module that searches possible variation and faults of a manufacturing process, (3) a knowledge-based expert system module that provides a logical and symbolic explanation of the results from the inference module, (4) a relational database module that stores data used in the system, and (5) an interface module that provides a graphic shell for the users with ability to manage the whole system.