No label defined (Q4530619)

This book fills the need for a comprehensive presentation of control theory at an elementary level, focusing on statistical methods used in process adjustment, the so-called Engineering Process Control Methods (EPC) and their relation to the classical methods of process monitoring, particularly those using Statistical Process Control (SPC) control charts. The author presents the severe effects of autocorrelated data on control chart performance and advocates the use of active adjustment methods for improving the quality of products and processes. He uses a detailed explanation of Deming's funnel experiment to illustrate the need for process adjustment when there are process dynamics, and presents a description of ARIMA models and transfer function models from a statistical point of view. He offers several adjustment strategies, including Minimum Variance Controller, PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) controllers, EWMA (Exponentially Weighted Moving Average) controllers, deadband policies, and constrained variance controllers. The book also offers integration strategies for SPC and EPC methods, discusses multivariante ARMAX models and provides readers with a brief introduction to frequeney domain and state-space methods.