New Sampling Procedures in Coordinate Metrology Based on Kriging-Based Adaptive Designs

This chapter describes an interesting case of process innovation generated by transferring two statistical technologies from their native application fields to a different one. The technologies are prediction by Kriging models and sequential experiments, originally developed for geostatistics applications and clinical trials, respectively. The combination of the two, i.e., sequential experiments driven by Kriging predictions, has been successfully applied in coordinate metrology. The latter is a vast technical sector, widespread in industry, devoted to assessing product compliance to geometrical specifications by measuring a set of point coordinates on the part to be inspected. Preliminary results indicate that this technology transfer has produced a remarkable improvement in the performance of the measurement process, in terms of both quality and productivity.