Modern quality assurance (QA) specialists are utilized in diverse areas of management: in manufacturing, services, government, medicine, and even in the arts. These specialists are dependent on computers and a number of special programs, yet there is a need for a universal tool for solving specific problems in the QA field. There are a number of such tools, and this guide to MATLAB® is one of them, providing examples from the field of quality assurance, which addresses undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students, as well as non-programmer quality technicians who want to master the MATLAB® program in order to solve QA problems.

The present book is an introductory MATLAB® guide. It provides the MATLAB® fundamentals with a variety of application examples and problems from quality management, quality control, reliability, process improvement, measurement and testing techniques, and simulation problems. I hope that many non-programmer students, engineers, and scientists from this area will find the software user-friendly and convenient for solving their specific problems.

This book is the result of the cumulated experience of many years of teaching MATLAB® in introductory and advanced courses for students, engineers, and scientists specializing in this area.

I thank MathWorks Inc,¹ who kindly granted permission to use certain materials. I am also grateful to Biohealthcare Publishing (Oxford) Limited² for permission to use the text, tables, figures, and screenshots from my previous book, MATLAB® in Bioscience and Biotechnology (Oxford-New York, 2011). I would also like to thank the research fund of Kinneret College, for funding the copyediting of this book.

I hope it will prove useful to students and engineers in the QA sciences, and enable them to work with one of the finest of software tools available.

Leonid Burstein, Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee, Jordan Valley, Israel, January 2013–March 2014