Guidelines to Manage Measurement Uncertainty in Conformance Testing Procedures

This paper deals with new effective guidelines for keeping the decisional risks associated with conformance testing procedures below the given target values. The proposed approach relies on two closed-form expressions describing the dependence of both consumer´s risk and producer´s risk on three parameters: 1) the process capability index; 2) the test uncertainty ratio; and 3) the gauging-to-tolerance-interval ratio. Such expressions can be applied to establish the measurement uncertainty and the amount of guardbanding required to meet preset decisional risks, thus avoiding the need for numerical integration and greatly reducing the cost of conformance testing procedures.