THERMAL TEST SCHEDULING USING CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING

Temperature cycling test is one of the key stages in the process of testing circuit packs in telecommunications. To obtain a good overall test schedule requires that the thermal test is carried out efficiently i.e. with the minimum number of runs and valid configurations of packs at each run. However, finding valid configurations and building them into a minimal thermal test schedule is a difficult combinatorial problem. Constraint Programming allows both a way of modelling the rules of configuration and formulating a model to derive an optimal number of runs. We describe this model and the results obtained from it for a large multi-national telecommunications manufacturer.