Evaluating Measurement Accuracy: A Practical Approach

The goal of this book is to present methods for estimating the accuracy of realmeasurements, that is, measurements performed in industry, trade, scientific research– wherever the production process, quality control decision, or the interpretationof an experiment depends on measurement accuracy. The necessity for thisbook arises from the fact that the existing theory of measurement errors containssignificant gaps. In particular, the current theory focuses exclusively on multiplemeasurements and overlooks single measurements. Meanwhile, single measurementsare the ones most commonly used in practice. Moreover, the current theoryis incomplete even within the scope of multiple measurements. For example, it doesnot provide answers to such fundamental questions as how to translate the inaccuracyof a measuring instrument into the inaccuracy of a measurement utilizingthis instrument, or how to find the full uncertainty of a measurement result, i.e., theuncertainty that reflects both systematic and random errors.