A Novel Approach to Simultaneous Robust Design of Product Parameters and Tolerances Using Quality Loss and Multivariate ANOVA Concepts

Design and development of high quality products are of utmost importance to any production plant. Product design consists of parameter design and tolerance design, which affect the product performances and the manufacturing costs, respectively. Most products involve more than one quality feature. Design and development of such products raise multi‐response surface problems in which it is necessary to determine the optimal values of parameters and the tolerances for all responses simultaneously. In this research, an approach for simultaneous robust parameter and tolerance design is proposed to deal with multi‐response problems. The proposed method employs quality loss concept and one‐way multivariate analysis of variance. Two simulation studies are performed to validate the applicability of the proposed method. Research findings show that the proposed method performs better in quality improvement as well as in cost reduction than the existing methods. The variances of the responses are also lower than those of the other methods, that is, the proposed method results in a more robust approach to product design.