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A traditional approach to monitor both the location and the scale parameters of a quality characteristic is to use two separate control charts. These schemes have some difficulties in concurrent tracking and interpretation. To overcome these difficulties, some researchers have proposed schemes consisting of only one chart. However, none of these schemes is designed to work with individual observations. In this research, an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA)-based control chart that plots only one statistic at a time is proposed to simultaneously monitor the mean and variability with individual observations. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with one of the two... 

Different multivariate process capability indices are developed by researchers to evaluate process capability when vectors of quality characteristics are considered in a study. This paper presents two indices referred to as NCpM,and MCpM, in order to evaluate process capability in multivariate environment. The performance of the proposed indices is investigated numerically. Simulation results indicate that the proposed indices have descended estimation error and improved performance compared to the existing ones. These results can be important to researchers and practitioners who are interested in evaluating process capability in multivariate domain  

In some quality control applications, processes consist of multiple components, stations or stages to finish the final products or the services. Some quality characteristics in each stage of these processes (called multistage processes) can be represented by a relationship between a response and one or more explanatory variables which is named as profile. In this paper, a general model is proposed for monitoring multivariate profiles in multistage processes. To this aim, the multivariate form of the U transformation approach is first used to remove the effect of the cascade property between the stages. Then, three control schemes are employed to monitor the parameters of multivariate simple... 

Most of industrial applications of statistical process control involve more than one quality characteristics to be monitored. These characteristics are usually correlated, causing challenges for the monitoring methods. These challenges are resolved using multivariate quality control charts that have been widely developed in recent years. Nonetheless, multivariate process monitoring methods encounter a problem when the quality characteristics are of the attribute type and follow nonnormal distributions such as multivariate binomial or multivariate Poisson. Since the data analysis in the latter case is not as easy as the normal case, more complexities are involved to monitor multiattribute... 

In this paper, a heuristic threshold policy is developed to detect and classify the states of a multivariate quality control system. In this approach, a probability measure called belief is first assigned to the quality characteristics and then the posterior belief of out-of-control characteristics is updated by taking new observations and using a Bayesian rule. If the posterior belief is more than a decision threshold, called minimum acceptable belief determined using a heuristic threshold policy, then the corresponding quality characteristic is classified out-of-control. Besides using a different approach, the main difference between the current research and previous works is that the... 

While researchers have developed several approaches to attain design variable settings that simultaneously optimize multiple-quality characteristics, the multi-response optimization has become a common practice in complicated manufacturing processes. Most of these research works assume independency of responses where their variances are constant over the experimental space. However, there are many manufacturing processes in practice where the quality characteristics under consideration are correlated. In this study, an efficient approach based on principal component analysis and a conventional desirability function is proposed to optimize correlated multiple responses. This approach not only... 

Statistical analysis of profile monitoring, a relatively new sub-area of statistical process control due to its applications in different industries, have urged researchers and practitioners to contribute to the developments of new monitoring methods. A statistical profile is a relationship between a quality characteristic (a response) and one or more independent variables to characterize quality of a process or a product. In this article, statistical profiles based on nominal responses are studied, where logistic regression is used to model the responses. Three approaches including likelihood ratio test (LRT), multivariate exponentially weighted moving average (MEWMA), and support vector... 

Multivariate monitoring techniques such as multivariate control charts are used to control the processes that contain more than one correlated characteristic. Although the majority of previous researches are focused on controlling only the mean vector of multivariate processes, little work has been performed to monitor the covariance matrix. In this research, a new method is presented to detect possible shifts in the covariance matrix of multivariate processes. The basis of the proposed method is to eliminate the correlation structure between the quality characteristics by transformation technique and then use an S chart for each variable. The performance of the proposed method is then... 

Processes with multiple correlated categorical quality characteristics are called multivariate categorical processes. These processes are usually shown by contingency tables and are characterized by log-linear models. In this paper, two monitoring approaches including likelihood ratio test (LRT) and F test are developed to monitor multivariate categorical processes based on the contingency table in Phase I. In addition, a change point estimator for multivariate categorical processes is developed in Phase I. The performances of the two proposed approaches are evaluated in terms of probability of signal, while the performance of the proposed change point estimator is evaluated in terms of... 

In some quality control applications, processes consist of multiple components, stations or stages to finish the final products or the services. Some quality characteristics in each stage of these processes (called multistage processes) can be represented by a relationship between a response and one or more explanatory variables which is named as profile. In this paper, a general model is proposed for monitoring multivariate profiles in multistage processes. To this aim, the multivariate form of the U transformation approach is first used to remove the effect of the cascade property between the stages. Then, three control schemes are employed to monitor the parameters of multivariate simple... 

In some quality control applications, processes consist of multiple components, stations or stages to finish the final products or the services. Some quality characteristics in each stage of these processes (called multistage processes) can be represented by a relationship between a response and one or more explanatory variables which is named as profile. In this paper, a general model is proposed for monitoring multivariate profiles in multistage processes. To this aim, the multivariate form of the U transformation approach is first used to remove the effect of the cascade property between the stages. Then, three control schemes are employed to monitor the parameters of multivariate simple... 

Control charts are useful tools of monitoring quality characteristics. One of the problems of employing a control chart is that the time it alarms is not synchronic with the time when assignable cause manifests itself in the process. This makes difficult to search and find assignable causes. Knowing the real time of manifestation of assignable cause (change point) helps to find assignable cause(s) sooner and eases corrective actions to be taken. In this paper, a probabilistic neural network (PNN)-based procedure was developed to estimate the variance change point of a normally distributed quality characteristic. The PNN was selected based on trial and error among different types of... 

The quality characteristics of both manufacturing and service industries include not only the variables but the attributes as well. While a substantial research have been performed on auto-correlated variables, little attempt has been fulfilled for auto-correlated attributes. Ignoring the imbedded autocorrelation structure in constructing control charts cause not only the in-control run length to decrease, but also the false alarms to increase. To overcome these shortcomings, in this research, an autoregressive vector first models the autocorrelation structure of the process data. Then, a modified Elman neural network is developed to generate simulated data using the ARTA algorithm. Next, a... 

Quality characteristics are subject of both manufacturing and service industries, which include not only the variables but the attributes as well. In Quality Control area substantial research has been done for Auto-correlated variables; however, no attempt was done for Auto-correlated attributes. Ignoring the autocorrelation structure in constructing control charts cause the in-control run length to decrease, and the false alarms to increase as such. In this article we develop a new methodology based upon the modified Elman neural network capabilities to overcome this problem. Moreover, instead of back propagation, simulated annealing is suggested as an alternative training technique that is... 

In some statistical process control (SPC) applications, quality of a process or product is characterized by contingency table. Contingency tables describe the relation between two or more categorical quality characteristics. In this paper, two new control charts based on the WALD and Stuart score test statistics are designed for monitoring of contingency table-based processes in Phase-II. The performances of the proposed control charts are compared with the generalized linear test (GLT) control chart proposed in the literature. The results show the better performance of the proposed control charts under small and moderate shifts. Moreover, new schemes are proposed to diagnose which cell... 

In some statistical process control (SPC) applications, quality of a process or product is characterized by contingency table. Contingency tables describe the relation between two or more categorical quality characteristics. In this paper, two new control charts based on the WALD and Stuart score test statistics are designed for monitoring of contingency table-based processes in Phase-II. The performances of the proposed control charts are compared with the generalized linear test (GLT) control chart proposed in the literature. The results show the better performance of the proposed control charts under small and moderate shifts. Moreover, new schemes are proposed to diagnose which cell... 

An integrated approach is presented for predicting granule particle size using Partial Correlation (PC) analysis and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). In this approach, the proposed model is an abstract form from the ANN model, which intends to reduce model complexity via reducing the dimension of the input set and consequently improving the generalization capability of the model. This study involves comparing the capability of the proposed model in predicting granule particle size with those obtained from ANN and Multi Linear Regression models, with respect to some indicators. The numerical results confirm the superiority of the proposed model over the others in the prediction of granule... 

In this research, an iterative approach is employed to analyze and classify the states of uni-variate quality control systems. To do this, a measure (called the belief that process is in-control) is first defined and then an equation is developed to update the belief recursively by taking new observations on the quality characteristic under consideration. Finally, the upper and the lower control limits on the belief are derived such that when the updated belief falls outside the control limits an out-of-control alarm is received. In order to understand the proposed methodology and to evaluate its performance, some numerical examples are provided by means of simulation. In these examples, the... 

It is always crucial to estimate process capability index (PCI) when the quality characteristic does not follow normal distribution, however skewed distributions come about in many processes. The classical method to estimate process capability is not applicable for non-normal processes. In the existing methods for non-normal processes, probability density function (pdf) of the process or an estimate of it is required. Estimating pdf of the process is a hard work and resulted PCI by estimated pdf may be far from real value of it. In this paper an artificial neural network is proposed to estimate PCI for right skewed distributions without appeal to pdf of the process. The proposed neural... 

In most real-world manufacturing systems, the production of goods comprises several autocorrelated stages and the quality characteristics of the goods at each stage are correlated random variables. This paper addresses the problem of monitoring a multivariate-multistage manufacturing process and diagnoses the possible causes of out-of-control signals. To achieve this purpose using multivariate time series models, first a model for the autocorrelated data coming from multivariate-multistage processes is developed. Then, a single neural network is designed, trained and employed to control and classify mean shifts in quality characteristics of all stages. In-control and out-of-control average...