The study of variability in engineering design, an appreciation and a retrospective

TL;DR

This paper reviews the concept of variability in engineering design, focusing on parameter design, its historical development, and its role in minimizing variance in manufacturing processes.

Contribution

It provides a retrospective analysis of the evolution of parameter design and its significance in data-centric engineering, building on Morrison's 1957 work.

Findings

Historical analysis of parameter design development

Emphasis on transmitted variation in engineering processes

Highlighting the importance of variance minimization

Abstract

We explore the concept of parameter design applied to the production of glass beads in the manufacture of metal-encapsulated transistors. The main motivation is to complete the analysis hinted at in the original publication by Jim Morrison in 1957, which was an early example of discussing the idea of transmitted variation in engineering design, and an influential paper in the development of analytic parameter design as a data-centric engineering activity. Parameter design is a secondary design activity focussed on selecting the nominals of the design variables, to simultaneously achieve the required functional output, with minimum variance.