Knowledge acquisition for decision support systems on an electronic assembly line

Increasing global competition has made many manufacturing companies recognize that competitive manufacturing in terms of low cost and high quality is crucial for success. Real-time process control and production optimization are, however, extremely challenging areas because manufacturing processes are getting ever more complex and involve many different parameters. This is a major problem when building decision support systems especially in electronics manufacturing. Although problem-solving is a knowledge intensive activity undertaken by people on the production floor, it is quite common to have large databases and run blindly feature extraction and data mining methods. Performance of these methods could, however, be drastically increased when combined with knowledge or expertise of the process.This paper describes how defect-related knowledge on an electronic assembly line can be integrated in the decision making process at an operational and organizational level. It focuses in particular on the efficient acquisition of shallow knowledge concerning everyday human interventions on the production lines, as well as on the factory-wide sharing of the resulting information for an improved defect management. Software with dedicated interfaces has been developed using a knowledge representation that supports portability and flexibility of the system. Semi-automatic knowledge acquisition from the production floor and generation of comprehensive reports for the quality department resulted in an improvement of the usability, usage, and usefulness of the decision support system.