Multiobjective economic design of an X control chart

The prevention of defective products is a fundamental principle of total quality management and control charts are a powerful statistical tool to reach this objective, but they are expensive and may increase the cost of production. For this reason an appropriate design is necessary before the chart is used. In this paper a new approach, based on an evolutionary algorithm, to solve this problem is proposed. The design of the chart has been developed considering the optimisation of the cost of the chart and at the same time the statistical proprieties. The proposed multiobjective approach has been compared to some well-known heuristics; the obtained results show the effectiveness of the evolutionary algorithm. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.