An expert system for experimental design in off-line quality control

Abstract: Robust design is an efficient method for designing high quality products at low cost. The method examines the effect of a large number of design factors on the variability of a product's response due to various sources of disturbance. This effect can be observed efficiently by studying a large number of variables simultaneously through balanced, orthogonal array experiments, and by analyzing the resulting data using variance decomposition methods. In this paper we describe an expert system prototype for designing efficient experiments. Given the information on various parameters and their levels, the system designs an experiment using orthogonal arrays. This expert system is implemented in Prolog, which is a logic programming language for artificial intelligence research and expert systems development. The system was implemented under the P-Shell knowledge programming environment on UNIX.