Setup Adjustment for Asymmetric Cost Functions Under Unknown Process Parameters

This paper presents a Bayesian approach for the optimal control of a machine that can experience setup errors assuming an asymmetric off-target cost function. It is assumed that the setup error cannot be observed directly due to presence of measurement and part-to-part errors, and it is further assumed that the variance of this error is not known a priori. The setup error can be compensated by performing sequential adjustments of the process mean based on observations of the parts produced. It is shown how the proposed method converges to the optimal (known variance) trajectory, recovering from a possibly biased initial variance estimate. Simulations results are presented to show the small sample behavior of the proposed method under two types of asymmetric off-target cost functions: a constant asymmetric and a quadratic asymmetric cost function.