Optimal Inspection Plan for a Flexible Assembly Line

This paper considers inspection station location problem for a flexible assembly line that consists of multiple stages. By considering the trade-off between locating an station at an "early" stage and at a "late" stage, we have developed some dominance relations on a graph. Based on the dominance relations, we then present an algorithm that finds an optimal inspection plan and a heuristic approach that finds a near-optimal inspection plan. The effectiveness of these two algorithms is demonstrated by two numerical examples. numerical examples.