A general method for surface quality control in intelligent manufacturing of materials using a new fuzzy-fractal approach

We describe a general method to perform automated quality control in the manufacturing of materials using a new fuzzy-fractal approach. We also show how to implement this new method as an intelligent system to really achieve the goal of automated quality control in practice. Engineers deal with surfaces and surface properties in a wide variety of contexts. In manufacturing applications, the goal is to produce a surface with specific physical or chemical properties. The concept of the fractal dimension can be used to classify a complex geometrical object (O. Castillo and P. Melin, 1994). In this case, we use the fractal dimension to characterize surface roughness of materials for manufacturing applications. On the other hand, we used fuzzy logic techniques (L.A. Zadeh, 1975) to simulate the expert evaluation/decision process to obtain the quality of the manufactured materials. The process of quality evaluation is simulated in an intelligent system using as input the information about material roughness (fractal dimension), and then by applying a set of fuzzy rules to decide on the degree of quality of the production. The intelligent system performs this “expert” simulation, which in turn results in automated evaluation of production quality