Intelligent product quality control and defect detection: A case study

In manufacturing systems, several techniques and approaches were developed to achieve product quality control and defect detection based on centralized architectures and systems. A relatively smaller number of works consider developing distributed architectures and systems, based on active/intelligent products that are able to achieve autonomous quality control and defect detection, and only a few works consider ontologies for these tasks. In this article, we design and develop a distributed ontology-based quality control system that enables intelligent products to detect defects autonomously. A case study is conducted in a printed circuit board (PCB) assembly industry to demonstrate the feasibility of the suggested approach. We particularly show that ontologies contribute to the transformation of raw data to useful information for improved reliability and realization of distributed and autonomous quality control capabilities.