Sharif Digital Repository

In most modern manufacturing systems, products are often the output of several correlated stages. Nevertheless, quality of a product or process in both single and multistage processes is usually expressed by a single quality characteristic, two or more characteristics, or profiles. Although there are many studies in univariate and multivariate-multistage process monitoring, fewer works focus on profile monitoring of multistage processes. This paper addresses the problem of monitoring a simple linear profile that is going through a multistage process in phase II. Using a first-order autoregressive correlation model, the relationship between the stages is first modeled. Then, the cascade... 

In this study, we introduce a multivariate gamma distribution, then, by defining a new statistic, three control charts called the MG charts, are proposed for this distribution. The first control chart is based on the exact distribution of this statistic, the second control chart is based on the Satterthwaite approximation, and the last is based on the normal approximation. The efficiency of the proposed control charts is evaluated by the average run length (ARL) criterion. The results show that whenever the magnitude of the parameter shifts c<1, the control chart based on the exact distribution has smaller ARL1s, while for c>1, the control chart based on Satterthwaite approximation show... 

In economic design of profiles, parameters of a profile are determined such that the total implementation cost is minimized. These parameters consist of the number of set points, n, the interval between two successive sampling, h, and the parameters of a control chart used for monitoring. In this paper, the Lorenzen-Vance cost function is extended to model the costs associated with implementing profiles. The in-control and the out-of-control average run lengths, ARL0 and ARL1, respectively, are used as two statistical measures to evaluate the statistical performances of the proposed model. A genetic algorithm (GA) is developed for solving both the economic and the economic-statistical... 

A new approach is developed in this paper to detect general mean shifts of multivariate quality control systems and to determine the quality characteristic(s) responsible for the shift. This approach takes advantage of both a decomposition method and an EWMA-based control statistics that are employed for multivariate normal distributions. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology, simulation studies are provided to estimate the in- and out-of-control average run lengths under different mean and variance shift scenarios. Simulation experiments are also given to compare the performances of the proposed procedure with the ones of the well-known MEWMA and MCUSUM methods.... 

The usual key assumptions in designing quality control charts are the normality and independency of serial samples. While the normality assumption holds in most cases, in many continuous-flow processes such as the chemical processes, serial samples have some degrees of autocorrelation associated with them. Ignoring the autocorrelation structure in constructing control charts, results in decreasing the in-control run length, and so increasing the false alarms. Moreover, when the object is to detect small shifts in the mean vector of a process, the performance of Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) control charts is dramatically better than Schewhart control charts. One of the methods, which have been... 

Recently, many researchers and practitioners have shown interest on profile monitoring as a relatively new subarea of statistical process control. One main reason for this interest, and perhaps a key factor for the contributions of many researchers to this field, is the various applications of profile monitoring in real life. Although one can easily encounter many univariate applications of profile monitoring in service and manufacturing environments, there exist situations where quality of a product or process needs to be modeled in multivariate terms. In this paper, we investigate monitoring of multivariate simple linear profiles in phase II when independence assumption of observations... 

Recent empirical results have demonstrated that generalized belief propagation (GBP) can be used to closely estimate the capacity of certain 2D runlength-limited constraints. We provide a partial analytical validation of these observations by showing that GBP yields a lower bound on the partition function of 2D Ising models with restricted grid size. While previous papers have proved that belief propagation (BP) can be used to obtain a lower bound on the partition function of 2D Ising models, this paper is the first work that analyzes GBP-based partition function approximations of 2D Ising models  

In some quality control applications, processes consist of multiple components, stations or stages to finish the final products or the services. Some quality characteristics in each stage of these processes (called multistage processes) can be represented by a relationship between a response and one or more explanatory variables which is named as profile. In this paper, a general model is proposed for monitoring multivariate profiles in multistage processes. To this aim, the multivariate form of the U transformation approach is first used to remove the effect of the cascade property between the stages. Then, three control schemes are employed to monitor the parameters of multivariate simple... 

We study the impact of sub-array merging routines on merge-based sorting algorithms. More precisely, we focus on the galloping sub-routine that TimSort uses to merge monotonic (non-decreasing) sub-arrays, hereafter called runs, and on the impact on the number of element comparisons performed if one uses this sub-routine instead of a naive merging routine. The efficiency of TimSort and of similar sorting algorithms has often been explained by using the notion of runs and the associated run-length entropy. Here, we focus on the related notion of dual runs, which was introduced in the 1990s, and the associated dual run-length entropy. We prove, for this complexity measure, results that are... 

This paper introduces a novel method to detect the typical LSB (Least Significant Bit) embedding and the LSB matching steganography methods applied to grayscale images. The proposed method determines the changes made to some selected features extracted from the gray level run length matrix. It is shown that the run length characteristics can significantly be affected by the embedded message bits, so can be employed as a measure that is quite sensitive to the arrangements of the image pixel values. The extracted features are examined by a nonlinear SVM (Support Vector Machine) classifier with quadratic kernel that can distinguish between stego and clean images. Experimental results are given... 

In this paper, a new procedure is developed to monitor a two-stage process with a second stage Poisson quality characteristic. In the proposed method, log and square root link functions are first combined to introduce a new link function that establishes a relationship between the Poisson variable of the second stage and the quality characteristic of the first stage. Then, the standardized residual statistic, which is independent of the quality characteristic in the previous stage and follows approximately standardized normal distribution, is computed based on the proposed link function. Then, Shewhart and exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) cause-selecting charts are utilized to... 

In this paper, a new control scheme is proposed for Phase-II monitoring of simple linear profiles in multistage processes. In this scheme, an approach based on the U transformation is first applied to remove the effect of the cascade property involved in multistage processes. Then, a single max-EWMA-3 control statistic is derived based on the adjusted parameter estimates for simultaneous monitoring of all the parameters of a simple linear profile in each stage. Not only is the proposed scheme able to detect both increasing and decreasing shifts but it also has the feature of identifying the out-of-control parameter responsible for the source of process shift. Using extensive simulation... 

In this paper, an approach based on the U statistic is first proposed to eliminate the effect of between-profile autocorrelation of error terms in Phase-II monitoring of general linear profiles. Then, a control chart based on the adjusted parameter estimates is designed to monitor the parameters of the model. The performance of the proposed method is compared with the ones of some existing methods in terms of average run length for weak, moderate, and strong autocorrelation coefficients under different shift scenarios. The results show that the proposed method provides significantly better results than the competing methods to detect shifts in the regression parameters, while the competing... 

A new methodology is proposed in this paper to both monitor an overall mean shift and classify the states of a multivariate quality control system. Based on the Bayesian rule (Montgomery, Introduction to statistical quality control, 5th edn. Wiley, New York, USA, 2005), the belief that each quality characteristic is in an out-of-control state is first updated in an iterative approach and the proof of its convergence is given. Next, the decision-making process of the detection and classification the process mean shift is modeled. Numerical examples by simulation are provided in order to understand the proposed methodology and to evaluate its performance. Moreover, the in-control and... 

In some quality control applications, processes consist of multiple components, stations or stages to finish the final products or the services. Some quality characteristics in each stage of these processes (called multistage processes) can be represented by a relationship between a response and one or more explanatory variables which is named as profile. In this paper, a general model is proposed for monitoring multivariate profiles in multistage processes. To this aim, the multivariate form of the U transformation approach is first used to remove the effect of the cascade property between the stages. Then, three control schemes are employed to monitor the parameters of multivariate simple... 

In some quality control applications, processes consist of multiple components, stations or stages to finish the final products or the services. Some quality characteristics in each stage of these processes (called multistage processes) can be represented by a relationship between a response and one or more explanatory variables which is named as profile. In this paper, a general model is proposed for monitoring multivariate profiles in multistage processes. To this aim, the multivariate form of the U transformation approach is first used to remove the effect of the cascade property between the stages. Then, three control schemes are employed to monitor the parameters of multivariate simple... 

In this research, an iterative approach is employed to analyze and classify the states of uni-variate quality control systems. To do this, a measure (called the belief that process is in-control) is first defined and then an equation is developed to update the belief recursively by taking new observations on the quality characteristic under consideration. Finally, the upper and the lower control limits on the belief are derived such that when the updated belief falls outside the control limits an out-of-control alarm is received. In order to understand the proposed methodology and to evaluate its performance, some numerical examples are provided by means of simulation. In these examples, the... 

The quality characteristics of both manufacturing and service industries include not only the variables but the attributes as well. While a substantial research have been performed on auto-correlated variables, little attempt has been fulfilled for auto-correlated attributes. Ignoring the imbedded autocorrelation structure in constructing control charts cause not only the in-control run length to decrease, but also the false alarms to increase. To overcome these shortcomings, in this research, an autoregressive vector first models the autocorrelation structure of the process data. Then, a modified Elman neural network is developed to generate simulated data using the ARTA algorithm. Next, a... 

In this paper, we propose two lossless compression techniques that represent a two dimensional Run-length Coding which can achieve high compression ratio. This method works by partitioning the block regions of the input image into rectangles instead of working by runs of adjacent pixels, so it is found to be more efficient than 1D RLE Run-length Coding for transmitting texts and image. In the first method, length and width of consecutive black and white rectangles are transmitted. The idea of this method is new and it can be very effective for some images which have large blocks of black or white pixels. But in the second method only black rectangles are considered in order to transmit and... 

Quality characteristics are subject of both manufacturing and service industries, which include not only the variables but the attributes as well. In Quality Control area substantial research has been done for Auto-correlated variables; however, no attempt was done for Auto-correlated attributes. Ignoring the autocorrelation structure in constructing control charts cause the in-control run length to decrease, and the false alarms to increase as such. In this article we develop a new methodology based upon the modified Elman neural network capabilities to overcome this problem. Moreover, instead of back propagation, simulated annealing is suggested as an alternative training technique that is...