A Superstructure of Process Capability Indices for Circular Specification Region

Abstract

Circular specification regions can be seen in processes like hitting a target (in ballistics), drilling a hole (in manufacturing industries) and so on. However, only a few process capability indices are available in the literature to address the problem. Most of these indices, in turn, make some assumptions like equality of variance and independence of the two axes of the circular tolerance region. Since, in most of the cases, these assumptions are not practically viable, in the present article, we have proposed a few of the process capability indices which do not need the above assumptions to be valid. Also, we propose a superstructure which unifies all the proposed indices. Some properties of these indices have been studied including the threshold value and the relationship of the proportion of non-conformance with the member indices of the superstructure. These strengthen the practical utility of the superstructure. Distributional properties like expectations and variances of the member indices of the superstructure are also studied to have a better insight about the indices. A real life example has been discussed to carry out a comparative study of the performance of the existing as well as the newly developed indices.