Economic-Statistical Design of EWMA Control Charts Based on Taguchi's Loss Function

Abstract

This paper proposes an economic-statistical design of the EWMA chart with time-varying control limits in which the Taguchi's quadratic loss function is incorporated into the economic-statistical design based on Lorenzen and Vance's economical model. A nonlinear programming with statistical performance constraints is developed and solved to minimize the expected total quality cost per unit time. This model, which is divided into three parts, depends on whether production continues during the period when the assignable cause is being searched for and/or repaired. Through a computational procedure, the optimal decision variables, including the sample size, the sampling interval, the control limit width, and the smoothing constant, can be solved for by each model. It is showed that the optimal economic-statistical design solution can be found from the set of optimal solutions obtained from the statistical design, and both the optimal sample size and sampling interval always decrease as the magnitude of shift increases.