Optimal target selection for unbalanced tolerance design

In many manufacturing processes, unbalanced tolerance design is a common occurrence. It occurs when the deviation of a quality characteristic in one direction is more harmful than in the opposite direction. The failure mode in these two directions is usually different. Furthermore, automatic inspection and measurement technology are widely used by the industries. The non-conforming part will be detected automatically. Thus, a truncated asymmetrical quadratic loss function is assumed for the unbalanced tolerance design. Traditionally, the manufacturer would either choose the smaller tolerance as the tolerance for both sides, or would set the process mean at the middle of the tolerances. Both methods fail to minimise the expected quality loss. The purpose of this paper is to find out the optimal manufacturing setting such that the expected quality loss is minimised. The results show that the process mean should be shifted a little from the target value.