An economic off-line quality control approach for unstable production processes

ABSTRACT

An economic off-line inspection/disposition approach is proposed, which incorporates manufacturing variation. This approach includes a new inspection algorithm for inspections based on cost minimization and utilizing a specified confidence level for identifying in-control items. This approach addresses two situations not addressed in previous papers: (i) the last unit in the batch is conforming; (ii) inspection time is non-negligible. Advantages are that there is no need to record the original position of each unit, the impact of manufacturing variation is reduced and non-negligible inspection times can be easily incorporated. Comparisons of this approach to other approaches are provided.

KEYWORDS:

• confidence level
• inspection time
• manufacturing variation
• off-line inspection
• quality control

About the authors

Zhenlu Chen received her Bachelor degree in Industrial Engineering from Hebei University of Science and Technology in 2010. She is now working toward the Ph. D. degree in Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China. Her research interests are in quality control and reliability modeling.

Rong Pan is an Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering from Penn State University in 2002. His research interests include failure time data analysis, system reliability, design of experiments, multivariate statistical process control, time series analysis, and computational Bayesian methods. His research has been supported by NSF, DOE, Arizona Science Foundation, Air Force Research Lab, etc. He has published over 50 journal papers and many more refereed conference papers. He was the recipient of 2008 and 2011 Stan Ofsthum Awards and 2015 William A. Golomski Award. His papers won the Best Reliability Paper Award of Quality Engineering in 2012 and 2013. Rong Pan is a senior member of ASQ and IIE, and a member of SRE, IEEE and INFORMS. He serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Quality Technology and Quality Engineering.

Lirong Cui is a professor in the School of Management & Economics at Beijing Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. degree in Probability and Statistics from the University of Wales, UK in 1994. He has worked on quality and reliability related problems since 1986, and published more than 100 papers and technical reports. In 2000, he co-authored a book on reliability which was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. He was the person from mainland China to serve as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Reliability from 2005 to 2015. He also serves as an associate editor for Quality Technology & Quantitative Management and Communications in Statistics: Theory and Methods, Simulation and Computation. In 2005, He was awarded the new century excellent talents in university of China. His recent research interests are in stochastic modeling, quality and reliability engineering, simulation and optimization, operations research, and applications of probability and statistics in various fields.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the anonymous referees who assisted the present paper by their precious comments and suggestions.

Funding

This work is supported by the NSF of China under grant 71631001, and is supported by International Graduate Exchange Program of Beijing Institute of Technology.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zhenlu Chen

Zhenlu Chen received her Bachelor degree in Industrial Engineering from Hebei University of Science and Technology in 2010. She is now working toward the Ph. D. degree in Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China. Her research interests are in quality control and reliability modeling.

Rong Pan

Rong Pan is an Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering from Penn State University in 2002. His research interests include failure time data analysis, system reliability, design of experiments, multivariate statistical process control, time series analysis, and computational Bayesian methods. His research has been supported by NSF, DOE, Arizona Science Foundation, Air Force Research Lab, etc. He has published over 50 journal papers and many more refereed conference papers. He was the recipient of 2008 and 2011 Stan Ofsthum Awards and 2015 William A. Golomski Award. His papers won the Best Reliability Paper Award of Quality Engineering in 2012 and 2013. Rong Pan is a senior member of ASQ and IIE, and a member of SRE, IEEE and INFORMS. He serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Quality Technology and Quality Engineering.

Lirong Cui

Lirong Cui is a professor in the School of Management & Economics at Beijing Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. degree in Probability and Statistics from the University of Wales, UK in 1994. He has worked on quality and reliability related problems since 1986, and published more than 100 papers and technical reports. In 2000, he co-authored a book on reliability which was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. He was the person from mainland China to serve as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Reliability from 2005 to 2015. He also serves as an associate editor for Quality Technology & Quantitative Management and Communications in Statistics: Theory and Methods, Simulation and Computation. In 2005, He was awarded the new century excellent talents in university of China. His recent research interests are in stochastic modeling, quality and reliability engineering, simulation and optimization, operations research, and applications of probability and statistics in various fields.