Monitoring Correlated Profile and Multivariate Quality Characteristics

Monitoring multivariate quality characteristics is very common in production and service environment. Therefore, many control charts have been suggested by authors for monitoring multivariate processes. In another side, profile monitoring is a new approach in the area of statistical process control. In this approach, the quality of a product or a process is characterized by a relation between one response variable and one or more independent variables. In practice, sometimes the quality of a product or a process is represented by a correlated profile and multivariate quality characteristics. To the best of our knowledge, there is no method for monitoring this type of quality characteristics. Note that monitoring correlated profile and multivariate quality characteristics separately leads to misleading results. In this article, we specifically focus on correlated simple linear profile and multivariate normal quality characteristics and propose a method using multivariate exponentially weighted moving average control chart to monitor the correlated profile and multivariate quality characteristics simultaneously. The performance of the proposed control chart is evaluated by simulation studies in terms of average run length criterion. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a real case in the electronics industry. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.