Monitoring process for attributes with quality deterioration and diagnosis errors

The aim of this paper is to present an online economical quality-control procedure for attributes in a process subject to quality deterioration after random shift and misclassification errors during inspections. The process starts in control (State I) and, in a random time, it shifts to out of control (State II). Once at State II, the non-conforming fraction increases according to a non-decreasing function ψ(z), where z is the number of items produced after a shift. The monitoring procedure consists of inspecting a single item at every m produced items, which is examined r times independently to decide its condition. Once an inspected item is declared non-conforming, the process is stopped and adjusted. A direct search technique is used to find the optimum parameters which minimize the expected cost function. The proposed model is illustrated by a numerical example. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.