Quality design support system based on data mining approach

Quality design in practice highly depends on human designer's intuition and past experiences due to lack of formal knowledge about the relationship among IO variables. This paper represents a data mining approach for developing quality design support system that integrates Case Based Reasoning (CBR) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to effectively support all the steps in quality design process. CBR stores design cases in a systematic way and retrieve them quickly and accurately. ANN predicts the resulting quality attributes of design alternatives that are generated from CBR's adaptation process. When the predicted attributes fail to meet the target values, quality design simulation starts to further adapt the alternatives to the customer's new orders. To implement the quality design simulation, this paper suggests (1) the data screening method based on ϵ–δ Ball to obtain the robust ANN models from the large production data bases, (2) the procedure of quality design simulation using ANN and (3) model management system that helps users find the appropriate one from the ANN model base. The integration of CBR and ANN provides quality design engineers the way that produces consistent and reliable design solutions in the remarkably reduced time.