Intelligent simulation environment for electronics remanufacturing systems

In last few years, increasing product complexity, decreasing component size, and using double-sided boards have made surface mount technology (SMT) based electronics manufacturing (EM) components more difficult to assemble. This has resulted in the economic troubleshooting of EM defects being one of the main problems facing all manufacturers. Dispensing, placement, and reflow steps have been relatively improved with fully automated, accurate assembly machines. Although the authors have made significant improvements in the automated EM rework processes, it has been shown that the implemented changes in the EM lines have not yet produced a high enough percentage of the reliable finished products. To provide a Web-based expert decision support environment where a user can build up realistic process level outputs to identify bottlenecks, analyze the assembly and rework line to enhance system performance in terms of productivity, cost, cycle time, and quality are now important areas for today's advanced Java based tool for simulation of rework lines in life cycle, cycle time, and process variables is presented in this paper. Testing software is an expert system, which determines whether the process values will or will not produce a reliable solder joint and satisfies the cost and cycle time constraints. This is accomplished through the use of an XML (extensible markup language) knowledge file that defines the parameters/equations to be tested, their constraints, and dependencies along with a program module that interprets the tests. GUI (graphical user interfaces) allows a visual representation of the process attributes and results. This interface is capable of running on local Java enables Web browsers or being downloaded and executed as a local application. This paper reports the initial development and its current beta testing results.