An Economic Design of the Integrated Process Control Procedure with Repeated Adjustments and EWMA Monitoring

Statistical process control (SPC) and engineering process control (EPC) are based on different strategies for process quality improvement. SPC reduces process variability by detecting and eliminating special causes of process variation, while EPC reduces process variability by adjusting compensatory variables to keep the quality variable close to target. Recently there has been need for an integrated process control (IPC) procedure which combines the two strategies. This article considers a scheme that simultaneously applies SPC and EPC techniques to reduce the variation of a process. The process disturbance model under consideration is an IMA(1,1) model with a location shift. The EPC part of the scheme adjusts the process, while the SPC part of the scheme detects the occurrence of a special cause. For adjusting the process repeated adjustment is applied by compensating the predicted deviation from target. For detecting special causes the two kinds of exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control chart are applied to the observed deviations: One for detecting location shift and the other for detecting increment of variability. It was assumed that the adjustment of the process under the presence of a special cause may change any of the process parameters as well as the system gain. The effectiveness of the IPC scheme is evaluated in the context of the average cost per unit time (ACU) during the operation of the scheme. One major objective of this article is to investigate the effects of the process parameters to the ACU. Another major objective is to give a practical guide for the efficient selection of the parameters of the two EWMA control charts.