Quality-preserving Model for Electronics Production Quality Tests Reduction

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive test-selection framework for electronics manufacturing that reduces testing time while maintaining quality by dynamically switching between full and reduced test plans based on process stability.

Contribution

It combines offline minimum-cost diagnostic subset construction with online Thompson-sampling bandits to adaptively optimize test plans in real-time.

Findings

Reduced test time by up to 91.57% in PCB assembly stages.

Adaptive policy eliminated defect escapes under process drift.

Static reduction caused more escapes than adaptive methods.

Abstract

Manufacturing test flows in high-volume electronics production are typically fixed during product development and executed unchanged on every unit, even as failure patterns and process conditions evolve. This protects quality, but it also imposes unnecessary test cost, while existing data-driven methods mostly optimize static test subsets and neither adapt online to changing defect distributions nor explicitly control escape risk. In this study, we present an adaptive test-selection framework that combines offline minimum-cost diagnostic subset construction using greedy set cover with an online Thompson-sampling multi-armed bandit that switches between full and reduced test plans using a rolling process-stability signal. We evaluate the framework on two printed circuit board assembly stages-Functional Circuit Test and End-of-Line test-covering 28,000 board runs. Offline analysis identified zero-escape reduced plans that cut test time by 18.78% in Functional Circuit Test and 91.57\% in End-of-Line testing. Under temporal validation with real concept drift, static reduction produced 110 escaped defects in Functional Circuit Test and 8 in End-of-Line, whereas the adaptive policy reduced escapes to zero by reverting to fuller coverage when instability emerged in practice. These results show that online learning can preserve manufacturing quality while reducing test burden, offering a practical route to adaptive test planning across production domains, and offering both economic and logistics improvement for companies.