A robust posterior preference multi-response optimization approach in multistage processes

Nowadays, many manufacturing and service systems provide products and services to their customers in several consecutive stages of operations, in each of which one or more quality characteristics of interest are monitored. In these environments, the final quality in the last stage not only depends on the quality of the task performed in that stage but also is dependent on the quality of the products and services in intermediate stages as well as the design parameters in each stage. In this paper, a novel methodology based on the posterior preference approach is proposed to robustly optimize these multistage processes. In this methodology, a multi-response surface optimization problem is solved in order to find preferred solutions among different non dominated solutions (NDSs) according to decision maker's preference. In addition, as the intermediate response variables (quality characteristics) may act as covariates in the next stages, a robust multi-response estimation method is applied to extract the relationships between the outputs and inputs of each stage. NDSs are generated by the ϵ-constraint method. The robust preferred solutions are selected considering some newly defined conformance criteria. The applicability of the proposed approach is illustrated by a numerical example at the end.