RFID-Enabled Real-Time Production Tracking System for PCB Assembly Industry

Abstract

There are many varieties of materials and suppliers for the PCB assembly process; meanwhile, process modifications as well as order changings happen frequently during production. The PCB assembly industry is suffering uncertainty and unknowingness due to the lack of timely, accurate, and consistent production data. Therefore, real-time production information tracking plays an important role for the PCB assembly industry, which provides the right information to the right person at right time to support the decision making and optimize the production management. This paper applies RFID technology to capture the production data and process production information for PCB assembly enterprises. In a PCB assembly line, machines and materials are equipped with RFID device such as RFID readers and tags to build the real-time data collecting environment. A number of production information processing methods are proposed to extract the production tracking information such as progress, WIP (Work-in-progress) inventory from the mass real-time data through data filtering and selection. Finally, a case study is given to demonstrate the developed methodologies.