Quality-preserving Model for Electronics Production Quality Tests Reduction

arXiv cs.LG / 4/9/2026

📰 NewsSignals & Early TrendsIdeas & Deep AnalysisModels & Research

Key Points

  • The paper argues that electronics manufacturing test plans are usually fixed throughout production, which safeguards quality but can create unnecessary testing cost as failure patterns and process conditions change over time.
  • It proposes an adaptive test-selection framework that first builds low-cost diagnostic subsets offline using a greedy set cover approach, then uses an online Thompson-sampling multi-armed bandit to switch between full and reduced test plans.
  • A rolling process-stability signal is used to detect when conditions are drifting, prompting the system to revert to more comprehensive testing to control escape risk.
  • Experiments on two PCB assembly stages (Functional Circuit Test and End-of-Line) covering 28,000 board runs show substantial test-time reductions with zero-escape reduced plans in offline evaluation.
  • Under temporal validation with real concept drift, static reduced testing led to escaped defects, while the adaptive policy reduced escapes to zero by dynamically adjusting coverage as instability emerged.

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.