An FCM–GABPN Ensemble Approach for Material Feeding Prediction of Printed Circuit Board Template

Accurate prediction of material feeding before production for a printed circuit board (PCB) template can reduce the comprehensive cost caused by surplus and supplemental feeding. In this study, a novel hybrid approach combining fuzzy c-means (FCM), feature selection algorithm, and genetic algorithm (GA) with back-propagation networks (BPN) was developed for the prediction of material feeding of a PCB template. In the proposed FCM–GABPN, input templates were firstly clustered by FCM, and seven feature selection mechanisms were utilized to select critical attributes related to scrap rate for each category of templates before they are fed into the GABPN. Then, templates belonging to different categories were trained with different GABPNs, in which the separately selected attributes were taken as their inputs and the initial parameter for BPNs were optimized by GA. After training, an ensemble predictor formed with all GABPNs can be taken to predict the scrap rate. Finally, another BPN was adopted to conduct nonlinear aggregation of the outputs from the component BPNs and determine the predicted feeding panel of the PCB template with a transformation. To validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach, the experiment and comparison with other approaches were conducted based on the actual records collected from a PCB template production company. The results indicated that the prediction accuracy of the proposed approach was better than those of the other methods. Besides, the proposed FCM–GABPN exhibited superiority to reduce the surplus and/or supplemental feeding in most of the case in simulation, as compared to other methods. Both contributed to the superiority of the proposed approach.