Monitoring a Multiple Stream Filling Operation Using Fractional Samples

Abstract

This article considers a multiple stream process where it is possible to monitor only a fraction of the total streams at a given time. This situation is of interest in those processes where the speed of production is great and includes a large number of streams, but the ability to monitor the process is not fully automated. An adaptive monitoring approach is applied to a 52 stream filling operation. The adaptive fractional-sampling approach is shown to give superior results to the fixed fraction scheme and provides a great deal of flexibility in monitoring systems with a large number of independent streams.

^*The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, or the US Government.

Keywords:

• Multiple stream processes
• Markov chains
• ARL
• ATS
• Adaptive sampling

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors wish to thank the editor and referees for a thorough review process that led to several significant improvements to this article. The referee's insights and suggestions were especially helpful in clarifying the relevant issues surrounding the case study details.

Notes

^*The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, or the US Government.