Simultaneous optimization of quality and censored reliability characteristics with constrained randomization experiment

ABSTRACT

Product quality and reliability characteristics are important considerations for all manufacturers in the product and process design. Industrial experiments may include both quality and reliability characteristics with the goal to obtain a compromise optimization of the two responses. In many cases, such experiments do not use a completely randomized design. Instead, they involve a more complicated experimental protocol, for example, subsampling, blocking, and split-plot structure. This paper presents a framework for the simultaneous optimization of quality and reliability characteristics with random effects. The paper provides a linear mixed model for quality characteristic and a nonlinear mixed model for Type I censored lifetime to incorporate random effects in the analysis. Subsequently, the desirability function approach is used to obtain a trade-off between the quality and reliability characteristics. The mixed models in this paper can incorporate information from all censored test stands and random effects. The proposed framework provides engineers with an appropriate approach to simultaneously optimize the quality and reliability characteristics with random effects. The paper used a case study to illustrate the proposed framework. A simulation study is also considered to present the necessary of incorporating random effects in the modelling stage.

KEYWORDS:

• Quality characteristic
• reliability characteristic
• mixed models
• multi-response optimization
• random effects

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to the editor and three anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions in helping us to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [72002066, 71871204, 71902138, 72032005, and 71802145];Humanity and Social Science Youth Foundation of Ministry of Education of China [19YJC630117]; Training Program for Young Key Teachers in Universities of Henan Province [2021GGJS114]..

Notes on contributors

Shanshan Lv

Shanshan Lv is an assistant professor in the school of economics and management at Hebei University of Technology. She received her B.S. degree from Zhengzhou University in 2012, M.S. and Ph.D. degree from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, 2018, respectively. Her research interests include design of experiments, reliability analysis and improvement, and multi-response optimization.

Zhen He

Zhen He is a professor of the College of Management and Economics at Tianjin University, China. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Tianjin University, China, 1988, 1991 and 2000, respectively. He is an academician of International Academy for Quality (IAQ). His current research interests include reliability analysis, statistical process controls, design of experiments, response surface methodology, and six sigma.

Guodong Wang

Guodong Wang is an associate professor in the Department of management engineering at Zhengzhou University of Aeronautics, Zhengzhou, China. He received his BS Applied Mathematics from Nanchang University of Aeronautics, Nanchang, China, an MS degree in Reliability Engineering from Beihang University, Beijing, China, and a PhD in Quality Engineering from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China. His research interests focus on design of experiments and reliability improvement.

Geoff Vining

Geoff Vining received his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech., Blacksburg. He is a Professor at Statistics Department at Virginia Tech. He also served on the faculty of the Statistics Department at the University of Florida, Gainesville, as a practicing engineer with the FaberCastell Corporation and as an industrial consultant. He received 2011 William G. Hunter Award by the American Society for Quality Statistics Division for excellence in statistics as a communicator, a consultant, an educator, an innovator, an integrator of statistics with other disciplines and an implementer who obtains meaningful results. In 2010, Dr. Vining received the Shewhart Medal, the ASQ career award for outstanding technical leadership in the field of modern quality control. He has been Editor-in-Chief for Quality Engineering (2009-2010) and Editor for Journal of Quality Technology (1998-2000). AUTHOR