Monitoring of an industrial process by multivariate control charts based on principal component analysis

The control and monitoring of an industrial process is performed in this paper by the multivariate control charts. The process analysed consists of the bottling of the entire production of 1999 of the sparkling wine "Asti Spumante". This process is characterised by a great number of variables that can be treated with multivariate techniques. The monitoring of the process performed with classical Shewhart charts is very dangerous because they do not take into account the presence of functional relationships between the variables. The industrial process was firstly analysed by multivariate control charts based on Principal Component Analysis. This approach allowed the identification of problems in the process and of their causes. Successively, the SMART Charts (Simultaneous Scores Monitoring And Residual Tracking) were built in order to study the process in its whole. In spite of the successful identification of the presence of problems in the monitored process, the Smart chart did not allow an easy identification of the special causes of variation which casued the problems themselves.