International Journal of Industrial Engineering & Production Research

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  Although control charts are very common to monitoring process changes, they usually do not indicate the real time of the changes. Identifying the real time of the process changes is known as change-point estimation problem. There are a number of change point models in the literature however most of the existing approaches are dedicated to normal processes. In this paper we propose a novel approach based on clustering techniques to estimate Shewhart control chart change-point when a sustained shift is occurrs in the process mean. For this purpose we devise a new clustering mechanism, a new similarity measure and a new objective function. The proposed approach is not only capable of detecting process change-points, but also automatically estimates the true values of the out-of-control parameters of the process. We also compare the performance of the proposed approach with existing methods.

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Response surface methodology is a common tool in optimizing processes. It mainly concerns situations when there is only one response of interest. However, many designed experiments often involve simultaneous optimization of several quality characteristics. This is called a Multiresponse Surface Optimization problem. A common approach in dealing with these problems is to apply desirability function approach combined with an optimization algorithm to determine the best settings of control variables. As the response surfaces are often nonlinear and complex a number of meta-heuristic search techniques have been widely for optimizing the objective function. Amongst these techniques genetic algorithm, simulated annealing, tabu search and hybridization of them have drawn a great deal of attention so far. This study presents the use of harmony search algorithm for Multiresponse surface optimization. It is one of the recently developed meta heuristic algorithms that has been successfully applied to several engineering problems. This music inspired heuristic is conceptualized from the musical process of searching for a perfect state of harmony. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated by an example from the literature. Results indicate the efficiency and outperformance of the method in comparison with some previously used methods.