Virtual metrology for enabling zero-defect manufacturing: a review and prospects

The ultimate objective of “Zero-Defect Manufacturing,” as a new growth step of Industry 4.0, is to significantly increase product yield and eventually accomplish zero-defect. For product quality inspection, the production sector currently uses physical inspection, which is an offline destructive test with a high discovery cost. Virtual metrology (VM), as one of the key technological methods to increase product yield, can forecast product quality through production process data, transforming conventional offline and delayed quality sampling into online and real-time quality full inspection. The growth timeline, application areas, methods, and technologies of VM are examined horizontally and vertically along the timeline in this article. Finally, the future growth of VM is prospected, and a manufacturing industry product quality management system that integrates data preprocessing and visualization, VM, and quality tracing is proposed.