Quality (business) | EPFL Graph Search

In business, engineering, and manufacturing, quality – or high quality – has a pragmatic interpretation as the non-inferiority or superiority of something (goods or services); it is also defined as being suitable for the intended purpose (fitness for purpose) while satisfying customer expectations. Quality is a perceptual, conditional, and somewhat subjective attribute and may be understood differently by different people. Consumers may focus on the specification quality of a product/service, or how it compares to competitors in the marketplace. Producers might measure the conformance quality, or degree to which the product/service was produced correctly. Support personnel may measure quality in the degree that a product is reliable, maintainable, or sustainable. In such ways, the subjectivity of quality is rendered objective via operational definitions and measured with metrics such as proxy measures. In a general manner, quality in business consists of "producing a good or service

Ensuring Asset Optimization through Ontology-based Modelling of Technical Documentation

Andreas Koukias

The physical or engineering assets within modern industries have consistently been considered as the core elements of significant value that constitute the backbone for success and overall growth. Ensuring the optimal performance of an asset is a crucial and challenging task, since any breakdown or downtime may have a large impact on product quality, cost of production, operation effectiveness, or even cause health, safety and environmental issues. The performance of any asset within an industrial environment is greatly dependent on the overall usage and maintenance instructions provided by the asset manufacturer to the user. These instructions have always been in the form of a technical documents compilation that accompanies the physical asset. These documents describe the product in a complete manner and often constitute the first line of support when asset operators or maintenance engineers need help with a problem or when they seek to advance their use of an asset. The documentation inherently dictates how the asset should be overall managed in order to achieve the optimal performance. The motivation for this work lies in the fact that traditional technical documentations mainly consist of textual and graphical documents with information that is not being properly put to effective use. Although there has been great progress in newer electronic versions, essentially it is still an arduous and time-consuming process for the users to identify specific answers to their problems or questions. It often requires considerable effort to locate much needed information, especially in case of unexpected emergencies. The documentation is often inaccessible, outdated, has a poor structure and language, and may assume knowledge that the readers don't essentially possess. Therefore, the information included in the documentation is not always being properly and fully consumed by the asset users. Overall, there is a gap between the original documentation instructions and the actual usage that may prevent the assetsâ overall effectiveness from reaching its full potential and may have great repercussions such as damage to the assets, the environment, or even injury to the personnel[6]. This dissertation proposes an ontology-based approach to represent the technical documentation content concerning the assetâs overall usage and maintenance. Ontologies possess high expressive power and degree of formality and most importantly they can describe the content in a machine understandable manner. The approach proposes using ontologies towards efficiently processing and consuming the documentation content in order to confirm that the asset is operated and maintained according to the manufacturerâs instructions. The Technical Documentation Ontology model is developed to represent all the important information contained in the documentation concerning how the asset should be managed. The approach subsequently proposes the implementation of a rule-based mechanism to check the real asset information that is collected during the actual asset usage against the documentation instructions. By comparing the real asset data and the respective instructions, it is possible to identify abnormal behaviors or deviations and recommend appropriate usage and maintenance actions towards ensuring or even optimizing the asset performance. Finally, the approach is validated and evaluated within a case study implemented on a packaging machine from a major Swiss company.

EPFL2014

Virtual metrology as an approach for product quality estimation in Industry 4.0: a systematic review and integrative conceptual framework

Gökan May

Virtual metrology (VM) involves estimating a product's quality directly from production process data without physically measuring it. This enables the product quality of each unit of production to be monitored in real time, while preserving the process efficiency. Initially developed for the semiconductor industry, VM has recently been examined for use in other industrial fields. VM is enabled by components such as quality estimators and drift detectors. It enhances various industrial applications such as machine control and sampling decision systems. The literature lacks a comprehensive summary and a systematic review of the state of the art in VM. To fill this gap, this study followed a systematic methodology to conduct a complete and structured literature review of VM. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the 199 papers that we identified based on our search and selection criteria. Following our methodological framework, we assigned these papers to categories and highlighted shortcomings. Finally, we discussed VM's use in various industrial fields, underlining its potential for every manufacturing industry. This study and the proposed framework are useful for both practitioners and academicians since they raise crucial theoretical and managerial questions as well as provide suggestions for further research on this critical topic.

TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD2021

On Quality Attribute Based Software Engineering

Otto Preiss, Alain Wegmann

For a software system to be perceived as a success, or even just as properly functioning, many quality attributes, besides functionality, need to be at an acceptable level. However, current software development processes focus on the functional aspects of a system to be developed. They hardly help to systematically engineer for quality attributes other than functionality. It is a system`s architecture by which such quality requirements are satisfied. In particular, software components are an incarnation of architectural means, which have come into being to better cope with the variety of quality aspects of software systems. Unfortunately, architectural artifacts appear somewhat magically sometimes, and so do components. Hence, components are not a major extension to OO in the programming language or conceptual modeling sense, but a basis to address many of the quality requirements, be they discernable or non-discernable at system runtime. CBSE, being the discipline of engineering with components, is a promising basis to more explicitly and systematically design with and for quality attributes. After defining the context and classifying quality attributes, we first illustrate the important relationship of quality attributes to use case realizations. Second, we argue for components as the fulcrum point for the realization of functional and extra-functional roles. Third, we identify ongoing research directions that we consider conducive towards a software engineering process that supports the design for functional and extra-functional requirements.

2001

Ensuring Asset Optimization through Ontology-based Modelling of Technical Documentation

Andreas Koukias

EPFL2014