Under the common objective to improve process productivity and product quality, SPC (Statistical Process Control) and APC (Automatic Process Control) are used in the part industry and process industry, respectively. However, people responsibe for SPC and for APC are usually from different departments and have different technical backgrounds, and therefore, there have been some controversy and misunderstanding. Since automation in the part industry and conglomerate process is common nowadays, we need to combine these two areas of knowledge for a successful process control.
In this thesis, we investigate such SPC techniques as control charts, Taguchi method, optimal target value selection, etc. And examine automatic control techniques based upon time series models. In addition, the concept and procedures of algorithmic SPC(ASPC), as an interface between the SPC and APC, were introduced. Finally, we present further research areas for combining SPC and APC effectively.
