Using health forecasts made with the Mahalanobis distance from the results of health checkups over a two-year period, medical examination items were selected, an economic evaluation was carried out by a loss function, and the potential for reducing costs was verified. The functional limit △0, costA, lossA0, and distance tolerance △ were determined. As a result, from the value of Δ obtained by economic calculation of the loss function, it became evident that 1.5 was an appropriate threshold value for distinguishing healthy from unhealthy individ uals. This was also confirmed from the results of calculation of the standard S/N ratio. When threshold values were studied and examination items were selected on the basis of these results, one small enterprise was able to reduce its costs by 10 million yen, and the results suggested that healthy/unhealthy diagnoses could be made from health checkup data for two or three years without a medical examination by a doctor.

Excellent reproducibility of functionality evaluation of welding in thick-plate tailored blank processes was obtained by using a standard S/N ratio calculated on the assumption that the characteristics of parent materials were in their standard and ideal states. The reproducibility obtained by using the standard S/N ratio also proved to be superior to the reproducibility obtained by using a zero-point proportional expression with Hooke's law considered as the ideal function, as has been done for joining problems in the past.

There is a growing need to shorten automotive development time in order to respond promptly to customer requirements. In the basic material processing field of metal mold machining, technology has been developed to shorten machining time by proceeding in one processing step from castings with a 2mm stock allowance to the finished mold, by using a small ball end mill to machine all curved surfaces with a single tool. The first application of this technique was to molds for cylinder heads, which are among the principle components of automobile engines. In the machining of complex shapes such as those of cylinder head molds, conventional processes, which reduce the cutting speed where the cutting load is high, are inefficient and tend to produce vibration and chipping. Quality engineering was used to stabilize the process and find more efficient conditions. Recently, quality engineering has been used with great success to optimize cutting conditions by energy evaluation, but there have been few examples in intermittent cutting operations such as ball end milling. In this study, the basic function was taken to be a linear correlation between cutting volume and cutting energy, and optimal ball end milling conditions were found by analyzing intermittent cutting waveforms. Efficiency was improved by a factor of three with essentially the same machining accuracy as before.

Functional evaluation is not only a tool for product improvement through para meter design; it can also be considered from the consumer's viewpoint, as an aspect of commercial transactions. This paper is an interim report covering the first year of discussions, conducted by the Functional Evaluation Committee of the Japanese Standards Association, of the standardization of functional evalu ation for such transactions. Since the main purpose of functional evaluation in transactions is to compare performance, characteristic values do not have to be additive. The evaluation is directed mainly toward target functions, which are treated dynamically with consideration of signal and noise. The Japanese Industrial Standards cover only the basics of functional analysis, and do not specify signal and noise levels. The reason is to prevent the standards from becoming obsolete, and to let the supplier take responsibility for dynamically managing the signal and noise ranges.

Recently, many case studies of quality engineering by CAE simulation have been published. Their subject matter has become more specialized and complicated, making the field more inaccessible to novice students. This case study of the design of a flip-up gate concentrates on a two-step design procedure, the first step involving definition of the ideal functions, robust design by using the standard S/N ratio, and tuning of β1 and β2 determined by orthogonal expansion, the second step consisting of confirmation through a scale model that the robust factor levels and tuning factors found by simulation are also valid in an actual device. Evaluation carried out by a simplified Spreadsheet Software simulation made it possible to reduce simulation time and develop an easy-to-use design technology.

Platen rollers for thermal printers are formed from metal molds, but the platen roller taken from the mold is beset with problems, such as inadequate accuracy and flash, so further surface processing is necessary. A grinding process is used to reduce the surface to the required shape. This paper reports on the application of quality engineering to the grinding process. An L18 orthogonal array experiment was conducted with the specified volume as the input to the process and there moved volume as the output. Reproducibility of the gain of the S/N ratio was confirmed from the results.

A study was made of education and the ideal engineer in relation to quality engineering. Education is essentially a stimulus process, in which it is important to maintain a balance with the transmission of knowledge. The importance of the stimulus process was elucidated by observing students, responses in quality engineering education at universities. Through a series of discussions, our research group members have come to an understanding that quality engineering rests on the balance between methodologies and perception (philosophy) of technology; thus it is wrong to attach too much importance to either of them, A study of quality engineering research results based on this understanding revealed that such research results are born not from organizational activities but from the abilities or understanding of individual members of the organizations. This study also revealed that about one in every ten students actually engages in research and development activities after receiving a university education, which agrees with previous research results.

Experiments were carried out for functional evaluation of water-based roller ball. In an ideal pen, ink consumption y was considered to be proportional to writing distance M. Experimental apparatus was built, pen function was evaluated with the usage conditions as a noise factor, and the S/N ratios of four manufacturers'pens were compared. The results made it clear that functional evaluation could not be carried out on the basis of the S/N ratio alone, but suggested that pen fuction could be evaluated in a comparatively short time by comparing the results of 100-meter writing tests. It became evident that function should be clearly defined in terms of the contribution and variation of each evaluated condition to the S/N ratio and the linearity L, considering the conditions under which the user will use the pen, and that the evaluation should be made by comparison with the defined function.