Title: Design for Quality with an Analytical Approach.
Abstract: This paper presents an analytical approach to the problem of designing a product in consideration of its quality, i.e. the design-for-quality problem. At the stage of product design, product's quality is evaluated with Taguchi's quality loss function, which can be regarded as a measure of the generalized quality cost of the product. In the concept of the generalized quality cost, not only the traditional quality cost, which is defined as the manufacturer's cost of quality, but also the user's cost of quality and the social cost of quality are included. At first, the design-for-quality problem is formulated as a problem to minimize the expected sum of the fundamental manufacturing cost and the generalized quality cost of a product. Then, an analytical approach to this problem is proposed, assuming that the relation among quality characteristics, design parameters and noize parameters is available. In this approach, the solution of this problem is derived without performing experiments. Further, the effectiveness of this approach is investigated through an example.