ABSTRACT EEC-9713003 ELSAYED Rutgers University Quality and reliability engineering is an essential ingredient required to maintain the United States manufacturing capacity effectiveness. Because of the importance of this area to U.S. industry, a planning grant, EEC-9526413, was awarded to Rutgers University and Arizona State University (including the Arizona State University) to explore the forming of an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Quality and Reliability Engineering. As a result of a planning meeting held in July 1996, sufficient industrial support has been generated to become an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC). The Center's initial research agenda will address: Improving Products that are Judged by Objective Measurements and Consumer Panel Data; Optimal Design for Quality Using the Voice of the Customer; System Reliability Prediction with Uncertainty in Component Reliability Estimates; Integration of Bayesian and Physics of Failure Approaches to Obtain Test Time Compression; A General Reliability Prediction Model for Accelerated Life Testing; Accelerated Testing for Electronics Manufacturing; Data Mining with Multivariate Statistical Tools; Equipment and Process Characterization, Optimization, and Qualification; Multivariate Process Monitoring and Control; Software Reliability and Development Process Models for Automobile Systems; Process Capability Indices and Loss Function. This proposal has been coordinated with Drs. Geogia-Ann Klutke and Lawrence Seiford, NSF Program Directors for the Operations Research and Production Systems Program.
