Yuko Teranishi

Development of Automated Data Mining System for Quality Control in Manufacturing

The production process in manufacturing has recently become highly complex. Therefore, it is difficult to solve problems in a process, by only using techniques that depend on the knowledge and knowhow of engineers. Knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) techniques are supposed to assist engineers in extracting the non-trivial characteristics of a production process that are beyond their knowledge and knowhow. However, the KDD process is basically a user-driven task and such a user-driven manner is not efficient enough for use in a manufacturing application. We developed an automated data-mining system designed for quality control in manufacturing. It has three features; periodical-analysis, storing the result, and extracting temporal-variances of the result. We applied it to liquid crystal display fabrication and found that the data-mining system is useful for the rapid recovery from problems of the production process.