Development of an integrated quality assurance system for manufacturing industries

Quality is a strategic activity that requires the emergence of numerous methods to implement quality concepts, leading to conditions that can be met only with the use of information technology to collect, process and exchange quality data within industrial organizations. Therefore there is a need for a computerized integrated quality assurance system (IQAS). Being a computerized system, IQAS is discrete. Considering a possible architecture of IQAS, the system is described relative to its component data and the acquisition, storage, processing and presentation mode. Data may be on-line or off-line acquired. It is organized according to the processing mode in a two levels distributed system, the first level with a main relational database and several local databases and the second one with real-time distributed databases, storing on-line acquired process data. The temporal and spatial consistency and the deadlocks detecting mode are underlined. Data are transmitted using NOVELL network for the first level of IQAS and MMS protocol and fieldbus networks for the second level. One aspect of data processing is the statistical process control. A set of procedures related to control charts and special functions was developed using UISL library. IQAS is now being tested with real data in some Romanian companies.