Process‐capability‐qualified adjustable multiple‐dependent‐state sampling plan for a long‐term supplier–buyer relationship

Abstract

AbstractAcceptance sampling plan is widely used for the inspections of incoming or outgoing products to provide the producer and the consumer a general benchmark for lot sentencing. To reduce the inspection cost, the multiple‐dependent‐state (MDS) plan that takes account of the preceding lots' quality history into the current lot disposition has been proposed. However, recent studies overlook the fact that the MDS plan's performance needed to reach target compliance decreases with an increase in the number of preceding lots considered. This unawareness makes the MDS plan fall into a conflictive situation. To overcome the drawback of the MDS plan, in this paper, we introduce a modified MDS plan to accommodate an adjustable mechanism, called adjustable MDS (AMDS) sampling plans. The presented AMDS plans are designed on the basis of the advanced process capability index, which is cognizant of both the process yield and the process loss. This established process‐capability‐qualified AMDS plan efficiently solves the conflictive situation of the MDS plan when encompassing more preceding lots in the lot‐disposition decision. Notably, its efficacy has been shown on high improvements in terms of the required sample size for the inspection, the discriminatory power, and the average run length for lot sentencing.