Meeting overall reliability requirements for heats of steel: A case study

ABSTRACT

In this case study, we examine the reliability of a device whose material was produced over several heats, where the quality metric of the material is the content of a certain element in the material. The analyses revealed a number of issues, including rounded data values as well as periodicity and tilting in the two dimensions of the production process. Novel analysis features include non-standard estimation of certain variance components, and combining several tolerance intervals based on optimization criteria. The results of the analysis were useful to both the customer and supplier of the material.