Economic designs for manufacturing system test and field maintenance

System testing is a complex process in doing a serial of diagnostics to make sure products are ready to ship. It is responsible for maintaining high quality and keeping a low testing cost. Field repair service is the major part of Geld service, and it is well known that field repair cost is a vast amount of money. Minimum system testing and field repair costs are particularly critical to competitiveness of an electronic company. Exploiting the statistical prediction technology as well as weight-based analysis, this paper presents a statistical prediction system testing (SPST) technique and a weight-based maintenance policy (WBMP) design for electronic systems. Example results show that SPST significantly reduces the cost of manufacturing system test. Key to the WBMP system is to use product´s status as a guide for performing maintenance tasks. A simulation model and test runs over a field service compatible environment demonstrate the potential effectiveness of WBMP to support field service operations.