This work presents the concepts of process design, problem identification, problem-solving and process optimization. It provides the basic tools needed to increase the consistency and profitability of manufacturing options, stressing the paradigms of improvement and emphasizing the hands-on use of tools furnished. The book introduces basic experimental design principles and avoids complicated statistical formulae.

As quality becomes an increasingly essential factor for achieving business success, building quality improvement into all stages—product planning, product design, and process design—instead of just manufacturing has also become essential. Quality Engineering: Off-Line Methods and Applications explores how to use quality engineering methods and other modern techniques to ensure design optimization at every stage. The book takes a broad approach, focusing on the user’s perspective and building a well-structured framework for the study and implementation of quality engineering. Starting with the basics, this book presents an overall picture of quality engineering. The author delineates quality engineering methods such as DOE, Taguchi, and RSM as well as computational intelligence approaches. He discusses how to use a general computational intelligence approach to improve product quality and process performance. He also provides extensive examples and case studies, numerous exercises, and a glossary of basic terms. By adopting quality engineering, the defect rate during manufacturing shows noticeable improvement, the production cost is significantly lower, and the quality and reliability of products can be enhanced. Taking an integrated approach that makes the methods of upstream quality improvement accessible, without extensive mathematical treatments, this book is both a practical reference and an excellent textbook.

In 1980, I received a grant from Aoyama-gakuin university to come to the United States to assist American Industry improve the quality of their products. In a small way this was to repay the help the US had given Japan after the war. In the summer of 1980, I visited the AT&T Bell Laboratories Quality Assurance Center, the organization that founded modern quality control. The result of my first summer at AT&T was an experiment with an orthogonal array design of size 18 (OA18) for optimization of an LSI fabrication process. As a measure of quality, the quantity "signal-ta-noise" ratio was to be optimized. Since then, this experi mental approach has been named "robust design" and has attracted the attention of both engineers and statisticians. My colleagues at Bell Laboratories have written several expository articles and a few theoretical papers on robust design from the viewpoint of statistics. Because so many people have asked for copies of these papers, it has been decided to publish them in a book form. This anthology is the result of these efforts. Despite the fact that quality engineering borrows some technical words from traditional design of experiments, the goals of quality engineering are different from those of statistics. For example, suppose there are two vendors. One vendor supplies products whose quality characteristic has a normal distribution with the mean on target (the desired value) and a certain standard deviation.

This book is written primarily for engineers and researchers who use statistical robust design for quality engineering and Six Sigma, and for statisticians who wish to know about the wide range of applications of experimental design in industry. It is a valuable guide and reference material for students, managers, quality improvement specialists and other professionals interested in Taguchi's robust design methods as well as the implementation of Six Sigma. This book can also be useful to those who would like to learn about the role of Robust Design within the Six Sigma (Improve phase) methodology and Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) (Optimize) methodology. It combines classical experimental design methods with those of Taguchi's robust designs, demonstrating their prowess in DFSS and suggesting new directions for the development of statistical design and analysis.

Dependability and cost effectiveness are primarily seen as instruments for conducting international trade in the free market environment. These factors cannot be considered in isolation of each other. This handbook considers all aspects of performability engineering. The book provides a holistic view of the entire life cycle of activities of the product, along with the associated cost of environmental preservation at each stage, while maximizing the performance.