Design and Application of a Modified EWMA Control Chart for Monitoring Process Mean

Abstract

The modified exponentially weighted moving average (modified EWMA) control chart is an improvement on the performance of the standard EWMA control chart for detecting small and abrupt shifts in the process mean. In this study, the effect of varying the constant and exponential smoothing parameters for detecting shifts in the mean of an autoregressive process with exogenous variables (ARX(p,r)) with a trend and exponentially distributed white noise on the standard and modified EWMA control chart was investigated. The performances of the two control charts were compared via their average run lengths (ARLs) computed by using explicit formulas and the numerical integrated equation (NIE) technique. A comparative study of the two ARL methods on the modified and traditional EWMA control charts shows that the modified schemes had better detection ability at all levels of shift size. Finally, two examples using real datasets on gold and silver prices are given to illustrate the applicability of the proposed procedure. Our findings advocate that the modified EWMA chart is excellent for monitoring ARX(p,r) processes with exponentially distributed white noise