This is the case that the unit space is defined at the edge of total space. There are two types of this. One type is to predict or unusualness, for example prediction of an earthquake or diagnosis of various diseases. The other type is to identify an individual person from a picture or to identify a handwriting word. The first type is to find or to predict unusual risky event and the second type is an identification of each person. This chapter explains a general methodology and Chapter 9 will explains the former and Chapter 12 the latter.

Spot welding is widely used for welding steel plates in the automobile body manufacturing process. During spot welding, melted metal sparks fly due to overheating and to variations in process conditions; these sparks lead to many losses in the manufacturing process. To prevent sparks, the present study attacked the problem of spot welding parameter design, taking process condition variations as noise, without pursuing quality characteristics. A feature of this study was that it evaluated cumulative energy supplied to the welding material per hour instead of evaluating weld quality by Hooke's law. In a confirmation experiment carried out under the optimum conditions obtained as a result, the gain of the S/N ratio was improved by the large value of 16.04 db,and estimates of robust noise-resistant welding conditions were obtained. Major effects of the reduction of sparks included increased weld area (improved weld strength), less rework, and reduced energy consumption.

In the car body assembly process, welding robots must weld various parts of the body, involving complex motion of the robot arm. Some programs place such a heavy load on the robot cables that they break, bringing the production line to a halt. In this study, Mahalanobis-Taguchi techniques were used to create a system that can diagnose a robot motion program in the programming stage and accurately predict whether the motion load placed on the welding cables will cause them to break. The techniques used included alternative characterization of time-series data and optimization of the unit space by parameter design. For a motion program diagnosed as a cable breaker, impact characteristics are extracted by using signal-to-noise ratios and are graphically represented to provide guidelines for improvement. The development of this diagnostic system has improved the efficiency of program development and reduced production line outage due to broken cables.

The Atractylodes Lanceae Rhizome used as an ingredient of Kampo medicines is a natural medicine derived from Atractylodes lancea and Atractylodes chinensis,two plants in the aster family (Compositae) widely distributed in China. The composition of these materials and the quantities of their components are known to differ from one region to another. In a previous study, the inverse matrix method was used to find regional differences in the componential characteristics of the Atractylodes Lanceae Rhizome. In the present study, a new MTA method capable of creating a unit space even in the presence of more than one factor with zero standard deviation was used to analyze the adjoint distances between specimens from sixteen locations in China. The results showed a different adjoint distance for each region, making it possible to use this distance as an index of geographical variation. If latitudinal and longitudinal differences measured from a reference region to the production regions are reduced to signals, then even when the production region of a specimen is unknown, the longitude of a production region having similar componential characteristics can be inferred from the adjoint distance.

Caprate (capitalization rate) is not only an essential element for determining economic values of tenant-occupied buildings and their sites, but also an important index used for comparison with stocks, bonds, and other securities. In particular,for investors considering whether or not to invest in a property, a favorable or unfavorable caprate is a key decision factor, and estimating it has considerable significance for economic activity. A desirable method of estimating caprate is a comparison with sales data of similar properties, but in practice this method is rarely used. The reasons are the paucity of sales data, the impossibility of calculating net operating income, even if sales data can be collected,because total expenses are unknown, and the lack of knowledge of the differential rate, even if the net operating income can be calculated. The TS method,which can produce estimates from even a small amount of known data, was therefore experimentally applied to caprate estimation. Accurate estimates were obtained, indicating that caprate can be estimated by the TS method.

In this study, the contagion of the cold contraction is distinguished by the remark of human voiceprint and by analyzing the voiceprint pattern. The electric diagnosis of the medical region that the doctor has done in the individual judgment is tried. The basic research is evolved for developing as a healthy instrument like blood pressure manometer. MT method is used as the analysis method for existence of the cold contraction. The experimental results show that the discrimination of the cold contraction is possible by the Mahalanobis distance.

This study sought further improvement through on-line quality engineering on a production line that had utilized total quality management (TQM) for over ten years and had already been frequently improved. On-line quality engineering as practiced by Epson is a tool-based methodology known as LPI (Logical Production lmprovement). Anobher objective of this study was to ascertain the usefulness of this methodology not only for researchers and design engineers but also for production staff. This paper will describe how, given these objectives,the new guideline of "loss" was brought to bear on Feeling, Experience Courage, Bluff problems due to repetitive improvement actions by the same members, how methodologies for improvement by using work process flowcharts were discussed, and how a switch from traditional passive TQM improvement strategies to more aggressive improvement strategies relying on on-line quality engineering was studied and implemented.

Together with technological development, reduction of manufacturing costs is urgent in the die-cast mold market, due to compeLition at home and abroad. The technology has been shifting from electrodischarge machining to less expensive direct cutting processes. One means of furthering this shift to direct cutting is to increase the direct cutting range by lengthening the tool overhang. This study describes a method of applying quality engineering to find conditions permitting the overhang length to be increased, and considers the tool chipping that resulted from the lengthened overhang. As a result of this study,optimal conditions were found that enabled the overhang of a 12-mm diameter ball end mill to be increased to about L/D=10, and the cause of chipping was determined.