Control charts for the on-line diagnostics of CMM performance

The quality of a production process is increasing its dependence on both the manufacturing technology, and the production control. In most applications controls are operated by relying on intelligent instrumentation to 'automatically' perform the programmed checks. However, the performance systems that verify the product's quality can deteriorate, as can the production process. This paper presents a method for the on-line verification of the performance of a coordinate measuring machine (CMM) using statistically based control charts. The method is automated and performed on-line during a normal measurement cycle. Some experimental results are then presented and discussed

RML: Runtime Monitoring Language

Runtime verification is a relatively new software verification technique that aims to prove the correctness of a specific run of a program, rather than statically verify the code. The program is instrumented in order to collect all the relevant information, and the resulting trace of events is inspected by a monitor that verifies its compliance with respect to a specification of the expected properties of the system under scrutiny. Many languages exist that can be used to formally express the expected behavior of a system, with different design choices and degrees of expressivity. This thesis presents RML, a specification language designed for runtime verification, with the goal of being completely modular and independent from the instrumentation and the kind of system being monitored. RML is highly expressive, and allows one to express complex, parametric, non-context-free properties concisely. RML is compiled down to TC, a lower level calculus, which is fully formalized with a deterministic, rewriting-based semantics. In order to evaluate the approach, an open source implementation has been developed, and several examples with Node.js programs have been tested. Benchmarks show the ability of the monitors automatically generated from RML specifications to effectively and efficiently verify complex properties

A proposal of a new paradigm for national quality certification systems

The goal of this paper is to suggest a new incentive model that is capable of creating the conditions for the autonomous growth of diffusion and credibility of the ISO 9000 national quality certification syste

ISO/TS 16949: analysis of the diffusion and current trends

The automotive industry has always shown a particular interest toward quality management systems, which resulted in the development of several different specific standards. As a result of this, by the mid-1980s, automotive suppliers were subject to numerous national and customer specific regulations. The proliferation of these standards and the need to create a single reference model led to Technical Specification (TS) 16949, an ISO technical specification aimed at representing a comprehensive quality management system for the global automotive industry. Since its early introduction, TS 16949 has encountered a certain success thanks to its feature of unifying and harmonizing the already existing standards. This paper studies the global evolution and diffusion of this technical specification, observing its impact on the local economies. The argument is supported by many empirical data

Service gap deployment: a framework to link quality gaps to service activities

This paper presents the service gap deployment (SGD), a new method to prioritise crucial to quality activities of a service that does not completely satisfy customer expectations. In the SGD, service activities (SAs) are related to gaps between customer expectations and perceptions so as to identify SAs that may need a redesign or improvement in order to satisfy customer needs. The method, which expands the gaps model of service quality by Parasuraman et al. (1985), supports the design of evolutionary and sustaining improvements of the service parts that generate customer dissatisfaction. Specifically, the SGD introduces three major contributions: 1) it creates a map relating service dimensions to SAs; 2) it highlights crucial to quality activities; 3) it allows a focused improvement of the analysed service. The description is supported by an excerpt from a real application example, concerning the prioritisation of crucial to quality SAs of an airport luggage delivery service

A worldwide survey on manufacturing servitization

Manufacturing servitization is defined as the process of innovating companies’ capabilities and procedures to support the shift from providing products to providing Product-Service Systems. Many studies have focused on this process, with particular regard to the potential benefits. Despite this general interest, a major void still concerns the quantification of its extent, e.g. in terms of involved companies and geographical diffusion. This study is based on the analysis of secondary data of a large sample of manufacturing companies from almost all over the world

A paired-comparison approach for fusing preference orderings from rank-ordered agents

The problem of aggregating multi-agent preference orderings has received considerable attention in many fields of research, such as multi-criteria decision aiding and social choice theory; nevertheless, the case in which the agents’ importance is expressed in the form of a rank-ordering, instead of a set of weights, has not been much debated. The aim of this article is to present a novel algorithm – denominated as ‘‘Ordered Paired-Comparisons Algorithm’’ (OPCA), which addresses this decision-making problem in a relatively simple and practical way. The OPCA is organized into three main phases: (i) turning multi- agent preference orderings into sets of paired comparisons, (ii) synthesizing the paired-comparison sets, and (iii) constructing a fused (or consensus) ordering. Particularly interesting is phase two, which introduces a new aggregation process based on a priority sequence, obtained from the agents’ importance rank-ordering. A detailed description of the new algorithm is supported by practical examples

Identifying car-sharing quality determinants: a data-driven approach to improve engineering design

Purpose - This study aims at identifying the quality determinants of car-sharing services, analyzing unstructured User-Generated Contents (UGCs) and, more specifically, online reviews generated by users of the same car-sharing service. Moreover, this paper discusses the implication of the proposed data-driven approach on engineering design. Methodology - A large dataset of car-sharing users' online reviews was analyzed by means of the Structural Topic Model (STM), i.e. a variant of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) technique which discovers underlying topics in a collection of documents also using document-level covariate information. Findings - This paper reports an analysis of UGCs related to different car-sharing services. The analysis unveils 20 determinants of car-sharing quality: customer service (physical office); accident & damages management; registration process; charges & fees; parking areas; app reliability; end trip issues; car condition; convenience; use rates; car proximity; car availability; efficacy; sharing benefits; customer service responsiveness; intermodal transportation; car start-up issues; customer service courtesy; billing and membership; car reservation. Originality – This paper proposes a novel approach to identify quality determinants by analyzing UGCs. The study of the quality determinants of a car-sharing service is a scarcely discussed field of research although the car-sharing sector is an increasingly important part of the transport economy

A novel algorithm for fusing preference orderings by rank-ordered agents

Yager proposed an algorithm to combine multi-agent preference orderings of several alternatives into a single consensus fused ordering, when the agents’ importance is expressed through a rank-ordering and not a set of weights. This algorithm is simple and automatable but has some limitations which reduce its range of application, e.g., (i) preference orderings should not include incomparabilities between alternative and/or omissions of some of them, and (ii) the fused ordering may sometimes not reflect the majority of the multi-agent preference orderings. The aim of this article is to present an enhanced version of the Yager’s algorithm, which overcomes the above limitations. Some practical examples support the description of the new algorithm