Economic designs for manufacturing system test and field maintenance

System testing is a complex process in doing a serial of diagnostics to make sure products are ready to ship. It is responsible for maintaining high quality and keeping a low testing cost. Field repair service is the major part of Geld service, and it is well known that field repair cost is a vast amount of money. Minimum system testing and field repair costs are particularly critical to competitiveness of an electronic company. Exploiting the statistical prediction technology as well as weight-based analysis, this paper presents a statistical prediction system testing (SPST) technique and a weight-based maintenance policy (WBMP) design for electronic systems. Example results show that SPST significantly reduces the cost of manufacturing system test. Key to the WBMP system is to use product's status as a guide for performing maintenance tasks. A simulation model and test runs over a field service compatible environment demonstrate the potential effectiveness of WBMP to support field service operations.