Diagnosing spatial variation patterns in manufacturing processes

Abstract

This dissertation discusses a method that will aid in diagnosing the root causes of product and process variability in complex manufacturing processes when large quantities of multivariate in-process measurement data are available. As in any data mining application, this dissertation has as its objective the extraction of useful information from the data. A linear structured model, similar to the standard factor analysis model, is used to generically represent the variation patterns that result from the root causes. Blind source separation methods are investigated to identify spatial variation patterns in manufacturing data. Further, the existing blind source separation methods are extended, enhanced and improved to be a more effective, accurate and widely applicable method for manufacturing variation diagnosis. An overall strategy is offered to guide the use of the presented methods in conjunction with alternative methods.