Expansive soils can be found in many parts of the world particularly in arid and semi-arid regions. These soilspose a significant hazard to civil engineering structures due to its high swelling and shrinkage potential. This paperpresents the results of an experimental program developed to investigate the effect of cyclic drying and wetting on theswelling potential of expansive soils with variou...

In a robust parameter design (RPD) problem, the experimenter is interested to determine the values of con-trol factors such that responses will be robust or insensitive to variability of the noise factors. Response sur-face methodology (RSM) is one of the effective methods that can be employed for this purpose. Since quality of products or processes is usually evaluated through several quality ...

Over the last few years, much research has been dedicated to the creation of decisions support systems for space system engineers or even for completely automated design methods capturing the reasoning of system experts. However, the problem of taking into account the uncertainties of variables and models defining an optimal and robust spacecraft design have not been tackled effectively yet. Th...

The constant pursuit of higher operating speeds combined with the effort to reduce power consumption creates increasingly stringent requirements for modern I/O interfaces. As the voltage margins shrink and the operating frequencies increase, the quality of the power delivery network becomes the critical factor that determines the I/O performance. A successful I/O design depends on having a robu...

Probabilistic design to address uncertainty and variability has been approached from many different angles, by different communities. While reliability methods focus on probability of constraint satisfaction or violation, robust design methods have focused primarily on the level of performance variation, the sensitivity of design objectives. “Six Sigma” quality concepts have arisen more recentl...

Face recognition has received increasing attention from diverse research communities and the market over the past years. Various techniques have been intensively investigated aiming at high recognition accuracy and robustness against numerous facial appearance variations. Application areas of face recognition have also been expanded and more robust systems are required as the application scenar...

This paper presents a method for assessing the quality of a progressive design process by measuring the profitability of the product that the process generates. The proposed approach uses separations, a type of problem decomposition, to model progressive design processes. The subproblems in the separations correspond roughly to phases in the progressive design processes. The proposed method sim...

We discuss the use of robust analysis of variance (ANOVA) techniques as applied to quality engineering. ANOVA is the cornerstone for uncovering the effects of design factors on performance. Our goal is to utilize methodologies that yield similar results to standard methods when the underlying assumptions are satisfied, but also are relatively unaffected by outliers (observations that are incons...