A survey of inspection strategy and sensor distribution studies in discrete-part manufacturing processes

Methodologies, modeling approaches, and the interactions between various system elements involved in inspection-allocation and sensor-distribution problems, that influence operational quality decisions, are discussed. The surveyed papers fall into two broad categories: inspection-oriented quality-assurance strategies and diagnosis-oriented sensor-distribution strategies. Within each subarea, individual papers are further classified according to the system characteristics of the physical processes being investigated and the modeling characteristics of the approaches being used. As evident from nearly 100 journal articles published in the past four decades, these two problems have received considerable attention from researchers in quality engineering, management science, operations research as well as robotic vision arenas. We find that the inspection-allocation problem has been studied rather comprehensively whereas the relatively new sensor-distribution problem has plenty of opportunities for researchers. Discussions are also presented to summarize our observations based on the classifications along with some thoughts on future research.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the NSF under grants DMI-0217481, DMI-0348150, and from the State of Texas Advanced Technology Program under grant 000512-0237-2003. The authors also thank the editor and the referees for their valuable comments and suggestions.