Evaluation of the quality of a car braking system by a dynamic simulator

Quality has become one of the more important factors in the purchasing decisions of the consumer. At the moment, the tools available for variability analysis in the production process, which is the main cause of quality degradation, are mostly based on statistical approaches that neglect the physical relationships that exist in a man-made system. In this paper a new general methodology is proposed, which gives evidence of how the development of a mathematical model could be more suitable if set by a relatively limited amount of data and a number of experimental tests. The implementation of the model in a dynamic simulator allows one to evaluate the effects of the variability of the most critical elements on the quality of the whole system numerically. The effectiveness of the procedure is demonstrated by the evaluation of some quality indexes of a car braking system. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.