Variability of the manufacturing process in the GPS framework: a case study

During the product lifecycle several types of uncertainty contribute to making it increasingly difficult to control product quality. The geometrical product specifications and verification approach (GPS) provides a mythology to match the ideal product with the manufactured work piece by considering three sources of variability and their related uncertainties: correlation, specification and measurement uncertainty. In this chapter we analyze the uncertainties adopted in GPS, and use independent component analysis (ICA) and time series analysis to discriminate the various sources of process variability. This will be done with particular focus on roughness measurements.