We are currently assisting to the fourth industrial revolution. The key for this revolution is smart manufacturing, which relies not only on technical and technological advancements, but also on novel and flexible quality-oriented management policies. The well-known ISO Standard 9001:2015 clearly specifies that an "organization shall provide the resources needed to ensure valid and reliable results when monitoring or measuring the conformity of product or services to requirements." In this context, the role of industrial metrology is twofold. On one hand, it is essential to define possible measurement-based acceptance/rejection criteria of products and services, as well as to design, implement and perform appropriate monitoring and measurement activities to check their compliance with given specifications. On the other hand, we have to maximize the probability that the measuring equipment itself conforms to the legal or technical requirements for its intended use, which is typically application-specific. To achieve this goal, measurement instruments have to be properly managed over their whole lifetime. In particular, they have to be periodically verified or calibrated.
This tutorial presents an introduction to the basic issues above and provides an overview of some possible solutions based on existing standards. The tutorial consists of three parts. First, the role of measurement and monitoring activities in quality-oriented organizations is described. Then, key concepts such as measurement process and measurement management system are introduced. Finally, a challenging and still open problem of industrial metrology is presented, i.e. how to choose the best confirmation intervals for measuring equipment.
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