A methodology for product reliability enhancement via saturated-unreplicated fractional factorial designs

Reliability enhancement constitutes an important component in product quality improvement. This work presents a methodology that unites the test effectiveness of Taguchi-type orthogonal arrays with the contrasting efficiency of order statistics at small sampling rates to create an optimization technique for improving reliability. The method relies on decoupling shape and scale effects and after a rank transformation, the super-ranking technique is applied to assign statistical significance to examined control factors. A case study based on aluminum milling operations is utilized to illustrate how the method presented here is adopted in screening through a can-stock product in order to achieve optimal levels of reliability. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.