Process mean, process tolerance, and use time determination for product life application under deteriorating process

Robust design can significantly improve a producer’s competitive ability to deliver high-quality products with low development cycle time, quality loss, failure cost, and tolerance cost. However, during usage by a consumer, the functional performance of a product or some of its components may change as use time passes, leading to unexpected product failure that is usually costly in both time and money. The cost of these failures may influence the determination of optimal use time and optimal initial settings as compensation for the possible process mean changes during consumer usage. In addition to finding use time and initial settings for proper quality performance, the determination of process mean and tolerance also needs to be considered. As is known, changes in process means acquired quality loss and variability, while process tolerance has an effect on tolerance-related costs and quality loss. Because there exists a dependency among use time, initial setting of process mean, process mean, and process tolerance, these values must be determined simultaneously. Thus, in this paper, an optimization model with an acceptable reliability value is developed to minimize total cost, including quality loss, failure cost, and tolerance cost, by determining optimal use time, initial settings, process mean, and process tolerance, simultaneously. Applications of single and multiple components are presented to explain the proposed models. Finally, sensitivity analysis and model discussions on some decision variables are performed.