Quality and productivity are two critical strategic operations competitive factors in modern manufacturing industry. A change in product quality standard specifications initiates related changes in the product manufacturing process design to ensure continued satisfaction of customer expectations. The specifications of the general-purpose rubber covered conveyor belt regional standard changed and customers had specific expectations they demanded on the quality of the product. Multi response surface methodology is used to determine the optimum cure times of rubber covered conveyor belts at the vulcanisation stage to ensure the product quality and process productivity requirements are met.

Multiple response surface methodology (MRSM) has been the favorite method for optimizing multiple response processes though it has two weaknesses which challenge the credibility of its solutions. The first weakness is the use of experimentally generated small sample size datasets, and the second is the selection, using classical model selection criteria, of single best models for each response for use in simultaneous optimization to obtain the optimum or desired solution. Classical model selection criteria do not always agree on the best model resulting in model uncertainty. The selection of single best models for each response for simultaneous optimization loses information in rejected models. This work proposes the use of multiple simultaneous optimizations to estimate multiple solutions that are ensembled in solving a conveyor belting cure time problem. The solution is compared with one obtained by simultaneous optimization of single best models for each response. The two results were different. However, results show that it is possible to obtain a more credible solution through ensembling of solutions from multiple simultaneous optimizations.

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