Ntegration of C Ontrol C Harts and D Ata M Ining for P Rocess C Ontrol and Q Uality I Mprovement

Controlling the quality of materials, components, batches, products and assemblies during the course of manufacture is probably the most popularly recognized Quality Control activity. A charting and pattern recognition tool has been developed using Visual Basic and MS-Excel to automate the drawing of control charts. This can also enable better visualization of process data and provide automated recognition of basic unnatural patterns responsible for process to go out of control. Data mining has emerged as an important tool in extracting the knowledge from process databases. An out of control condition can trigger an appropriate data mining technique if any unnatural pattern is found in any control chart for a particular quality characteristic of any stage of the process. Process data can be analyzed by independent data mining technique to discover hidden patterns in the parameters that control the manufacturing process to improve the quality of products. Expert system database of the organization may be updated by the extracted knowledge from various stages of the process. An algorithm shall be developed that can control input parameters to various stages of the process so as to achieve its over all performance by making use of comprehensive expert system database of the organization along with the integration of control charts and data mining.