A process oriented approach to automated quality control

To guarantee a constant quality of manufactured products, it is necessary t o optimise the process parameters immediately when deviations of the workpi ece quality have been observed. Established methods of quality management a re only able to register quality deviations (like the statistical process c ontrol) or to analyse them offline with the help of experts (like failure m ode and effects analysis). The presented approach develops a process orient ed automated quality control for manufacturing in two steps: First, a local quality controller stabilises the product quality to reference values in t he pace of workpiece production. In order to obtain the control law for the process parameters, a learning approach is applied. In the second step, th e information exchange between the local controllers is established paralle l to the workpiece flow in order to obtain an optimised global process. As an example, the method is applied to quality control in the turning process .