A complete inspection plan for critical components

Abstract

Quality control can be divided into statistical process control and product control. The product control area can also be divided into complete inspection plans and acceptance sampling plans. Complete inspection plans are becoming increasingly important in the area of quality control due to the growth in modern manufacturing systems that make complete inspection inexpensive and reliable. This thesis proposes a new complete inspection plan for multicharacteristic critical components. Optimization models which depict the plan are developed with the necessary algorithms and software. Comparisons with the existing models in the literature are carried out using randomly generated inspection problems. Efforts to explicitly incorporate material handling cost in the inspection process are made. The general model in the thesis referred to as model (2) performed better in terms of expected total cost of inspection than the models in the literature, in 75-80 percent of the randomly-generated problems. The savings in total expected costs range from 1-20 percent. Incorporating material handling cost improved the performance of the proposed plan compared to the ones in the literature. This was expected due to less material handling involvements in the proposed plan.