Copula-based decision support system for quality ranking in the manufacturing of electronically commutated motors

Quality ranking of finished products plays an important role in manufacturing systems. In this paper, we address the problem of quality ranking of electronically commutated (EC) motors by subjecting each finished product to a short measurement session. Based on the features calculated from these measurements, the motor quality is assessed by introducing a novel copula-based decision support system (DSS). The proposed DSS provides a full ranking of EC motors by integrating expert’s preferences and company’s quality standards. This approach overcomes the shortcomings of the traditional regression models, such as partial ranking and inconsistent evaluations with the expert’s expectations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DSS on a test batch of 840 EC motors.