Awaluddin Mohamed Shaharoun

Improved SPC chart pattern recognition using statistical features

Increasingly rapid changes and highly precise manufacturing environments require timely monitoring and intervention when deemed necessary. Traditional Statistical Process Control (SPC) charting, a popular monitoring and diagnosis tool, is being improved to be more sensitive to small changes and to include more intelligence to handle dynamic process information. Artificial neural network-based SPC chart pattern recognition schemes have been introduced by several researchers. These schemes need further improvement in terms of generalization and recognition performance. One possible approach is through improvement in data representation using features extracted from raw data. Most of the previous work in intelligent SPC used raw data as input vector representation. The literature reports limited work dealing with features, but it lacks extensive comparative studies to assess the relative performance between the two approaches. The objective of this study was to evaluate the relative performance of a feature-based SPC recognizer compared with the raw data-based recognizer. Extensive simulations were conducted using synthetic data sets. The study focused on recognition of six commonly researched SPC patterns plotted on the Shewhart X-bar chart. The ANN-based SPC pattern recognizer trained using the six selected statistical features resulted in significantly better performance and generalization compared with the raw data-based recognizer. Findings from this study can be used as guidelines in developing better SPC recognition systems.

Proposed relationship of TQM and organisational performance using structured equation modelling

Total quality management (TQM) has been considered as an infrastructural strategy in the operations management research field. It is one of the most recognised models for operational excellence besides lean operation, supply chain management, and technology management. Both manufacturing and service organisations tend to implement this strategy in order to maintain their competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper is to develop the conceptual model of TQM implementation in relation to organisational performance. The authors have reviewed the literature on TQM and organised the paper along two main themes: the evolution of TQM considered as a set of practices, and its impacts on organisational performance. Two research questions are proposed in order to re-validate TQM constructs: (1) Is the set of practices associated with TQM valid as a whole? (2) What performance measures should be considered to exhibit the effectiveness of its implementation?

Issues in quality engineering research

The field of quality has undergone significant changes as reflected by changes in its definition, paradigms, approaches, techniques, and scope of application. This paper reviews emerging trends and issues focusing on quality engineering. Changes in customer expectation have driven the changes in the technology of design and manufacturing, which is becoming more important in satisfying individual customer expectations. This also calls for special attention to the engineering aspects of quality. Brief reviews on recent advances in the prominent quality tools such as statistical process control, quality function deployment, and design of experiment are reported. General trends in quality engineering research show the tools are being enhanced, integrated, computerized and broaden their application bases, where possible opportunities for further investigation are indicated. Among others these include contributions in multiple‐response optimization, intelligent quality systems, multivariate SPC, and practical and simple guidelines for actual implementation of various tools.

Feature selection for SPC chart pattern recognition using fractional factorial experimental design

Publisher Summary Feature selection is one of the important steps in designing a pattern recognizer. This chapter presents a study to select a minimal set of statistical features for statistical process control (SPC) chart pattern recognition using the fractional factorial experimental design. A resolution IV design was used to identify the significant features from a list of ten possible candidates to represent the input data streams. Further judgment was adopted to arrive at the final selection in the light of some ambiguities among confounded two-factor interactions. The final six selected features set comprising, autocorrelation, cusum, mean, standard deviation, mean-square value, and skewness as the input vector resulted in an average correct classification rate of 97.1% and standard deviation of 0.878. This can be applied to other feature selection problems besides SPC chart pattern recognition.

EDAS: Software for End-of-Life Disassembly Analysis

In recent years, many countries have developed legislations which are aimed to force manufacturers to recycle their products at the end of their life. However, before end-of-life products can be recycled, end-of-life disassembly needs to be in place. It entails large amounts of capital expenditure and time. Besides this, product designers also do not have experience in disassembling and recycling to determine the impact of various design aspects on difficulty at the disassembly stage. Therefore, there is a need for a tool to analyse the disassemblability and recyclability. This paper proposes software named as EDAS to fulfil those needs.

Recent Developments on Computer Aided Fixture Design: Case Based Reasoning Approaches

Fixture design is an important issue in the process of manufacturing. As a critical design activity process, automation in fixture design plays an integral role in linking computer aided designs and computer aided manufacturing. This paper carries out a literature review of computer aided fixture design (CAFD) developments using intelligent methods that have been commonly utilized in automation in the last two decades. The first part of this review considers the steps of fixture design along with the significant researches and requirements of fixtures over time. After that, the paper presents important and relevant research carried out in the field of CAFD using intelligent approaches and the working principles surrounding this issue. The following section concentrates on the details of case based reasoning (CBR) approach, the most successful approach in CAFD. The examination of this approach is carried out based on applications, stages of CBR based systems fixture design, working principles, and pertinent proposed approaches. Lastly, the present drawbacks of the current methods and shortfalls in research are identified for future studies.

An isolated speech endpoint detector using multiple speech features

Energy and zero crossing rate of the speech signal have been the two most widely used features for detecting the endpoints of an utterance. This paper proposed a new approach for locating the endpoint for isolated speech, which significantly improve the endpoint detector performance. The proposed algorithm relies on multiple speech features: root mean square energy (rmse), zero crossing rate (zcr) and cepstral coefficient (cepstrum) where the Euclidean distance measure is adopted to accurately detect the endpoint of an isolated utterance. This algorithm offers better performance than conventional algorithm which using energy only. The vocabulary for the experiment includes English digit from 1 to 9. These experimental results were conducted by 360 utterances from a male speaker. Experimental results show that the accuracy of the algorithm is quite acceptable.

Preliminary Framework of Sustainable Maintenance Performance Measurement Systems for Automotive Companies

Sustainability has significantly emerged as a critical issue in automotive companies as they have been compelled to be more environmentally benign. Moreover, the role of maintenance management has also been increased as a crucial support function to become a successful and sustainable automotive company. Consequently, it is essential to incorporate sustainability thinking into maintenance management. This paper presents a preliminary framework for sustainable maintenance performance measurement system (SMPMS). The SMPMS is addressed to ensure maintenance management objectives are in-line with overall company objectives in terms of sustainability that balances economic, environmental and social factors.

Relationship between culture of excellence and organisational performance in Iranian manufacturing companies

High-performing organisations are those which practise exemplary Culture of Excellence (CoE). Global competition dictates that only high-performing organisations will survive in the long term. This study attempts to focus on the relationship between CoE constructs and organisational performance (OP) in the context of Iranian manufacturing sector. Data are gathered via survey, of 222 excellence award-winning companies in Iran. The SPSS and smartPLS were used to test the relationship between CoE factors and OP. The result of correlation analysis proved that all 10 CoE constructs were significantly correlated with OP and there exists a significant relationship between CoE and OP. Strong commitment was the most important factor and the bottom rank was high degree of motivation. According to the results, CoE might be supported as a perfect management system to efficiently upkeep organisational competitiveness. Current results might contribute to the improvement of superior OP through creating a reliable and valid measurement tool for CoE. This current research offers interesting insights for researchers and practitioners in the field of quality management.