质量保证体系(英文材料)

Quality Assurance
Quality has become one of the most important consumer decision factors in the selecting
among competing products and services. This is true not only for individual consumers but also for large corporations, government organizations and the taxpaying public as a group. In its broadest sense, quality is a degree of excellence: the extent to which something is fit for its purpose. In the narrow sense, product or service quality is defined as conformance with requirement, freedom from defects or contamination, or simply a degree of customer
satisfaction.
Figure 1: Taking a
Pavement Core for Density Quality Control
Figure 2: Taking a Pavement
Core for Density Quality Control Figure 3: Using the NCAT Oven to Determine Asphalt
Content Quality assurance. All those planned and systematic actions necessary to provide
confidence that a product or facility will perform satisfactorily in service. Quality
assurance addresses the overall problem of obtaining the quality of a service,
product, or facility in the most efficient, economical, and satisfactory manner
possible. Within this broad context, quality assurance involves continued
evaluation of the activities of planning, design, development of plans and
specifications, advertising and awarding of contracts, construction, and
maintenance, and the interactions of these activities.
∙Quality control. Those quality assurance actions and considerations necessary to assess production and construction processes so as to control the level of quality being produced in the end product. This concept of quality control typically
includes sampling and testing by the contractor to monitor the process but usually does not include acceptance sampling and testing by the agency/owner. Also
called process control.
∙Acceptance. Sampling, testing, and the assessment of test results to determine whether or not the quality of produced material or construction is acceptable in
terms of the specifications.
∙Independent assurance. A management tool that requires a third party, not directly responsible for process control or acceptance, to provide an independent assessment of the product and/or the reliability of test results obtained from
process control and acceptance testing. The results of independent assurance
tests should not be used as a basis of product acceptance.
Figure 4: Quality Assurance Diagram.
Quality control, acceptance and independent assurance are wholly separate components of quality assurance. It is difficult, if not impossible, to influence one component, solely through actions within another component. For instance, acceptance procedures are essentially monitoring methods used to determine whether or not a particular process is meeting quality standards. As such, they can be used to accept or reject material based on its quality but they should never be used as a method to control or improve quality; quality will not necessarily improve based on increased or stricter monitoring alone. In short, no amount of inspection changes the quality of a product or service (IQA, 2001). Quality control (process control) is used to control and systematically improve quality. Furthermore, independent assurance test results should not be used for acceptance or quality control. If they are, the tests are no longer independent and should not be used as if they were.
Footnotes (↵ returns to text)
1. TRB. (1999). Glossary of Highway Quality Assurance Terms. Transportation Research Circular,
No. E-C010. Transportation Research Board, National Research Council. Washington, D.C.↵∙。