Development of a Tool for the Easy Determination of Control Factor Interaction in the Design of Experiments and the Taguchi Methods

In recent years, the Design of Experiments (hereafter, DOE) and the Taguchi Methods have been used to decide optimum processing conditions with narrow dispersion and achieve robust designs. However, when large interactions between several control factors are present, since they behave as confounding variables, the estimation accuracy is significantly reduced and making practical use of the DOE and Taguchi Methods can be extremely difficult in some cases. As a common countermeasure, calculation accuracy is confirmed by comparing, through the S/N ratio and sensitivity results, the best and worst gain results. This can be of great harm in terms of time and labor and, if the difference between the best and worst gain results is large, could result in the Taguchi Methods estimations being ignored. In this study, a tool for the easy determination of control factor interactions in the DOE and the Taguchi Methods was developed and evaluated. Then a software of the tool was a developed and evaluated under several mathematical models. It was concluded that: (1) a usable tool for the easy determination of control factor interactions in the DOE and the Taguchi Methods was developed; (2) The tool was able to determine control factor interactions in DOE or the Taguchi Methods.