Research and Application of Intelligent Quality Control System Based on FMEA Repository

Although statistical process control (SPC) provides statistical techniques and graphical displays control charts to enable the quality of process to be monitored and special causes of process variability to be eliminated, this technology has been not all well applied in enterprises. The main reason is the process adjusting decision may be hard to determine according to the knowledge of the operators when the quality problem has been detected by SPC. In order to overcome this difficulty, an approach which combined SPC system with potential failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) repository is presented in this paper. Based on the FMEA repository, the operatorspsila decision making process can be supported by the intelligent searching and reasoning in FMEA repository, and the quality control process can also be facilitated. The prototype system named intelligent quality control system (IQCS) has been developed, and its application shown the efficiency of quality control can be improved. This study provides an effective way for manufacturing process continuing improvement.