9311824 Alexander The objective of this research are to: (1) develop a procedure for determining optimum process settings for this and other related fill problems; (2) to design and implement an effective automatic process regulation and monitoring scheme for effectively minimizing the variation in this filling process; (3) to recommend basic filling system design changes that will improve the overall filling operation; and (4) to investigate the effect of measurement error on automatically controlled processes. The research will address two important problem areas with regard to the pouch filling process. The first involves finding the optimal values for the process mean fill setting and the upper specification limit such that overall profit is maximized. The second involves the identification, control, and possible elimination of the sources of variation within the filling process. Since these problems exist in a variety of industries, the success of the research should have wide applications.
