Many engineering companies around the world are currently undergoing a quality
control and improvement revolution that originally started in Japan many decades
ago and this book provides a brief overview of this revolution. Robust design is
a central component of the modern approach to quality improvement and is a
phrase used to describe any engineering activity whose objective is to develop
high quality products (and processes) at low cost. A key characteristic of
robust design is the use of statistically planned (designed) experiments to
identify those process variables that determine product quality. Robust design
was developed in Japan by G. Taguchi in the early 1950s and its