Improving the Performance of Combined Shewhart–Cumulative Sum Control Charts

For an improved monitoring of process parameters, it is generally desirable to have efficient designs of control charting structures. The addition of Shewhart control limits to the cumulative sum (CUSUM) control chart is a simple monitoring scheme sensitive to wide range of mean shifts. To improve the detection ability of the combined Shewhart–CUSUM control chart to off‐target processes, we developed the scheme using ranked set sampling instead of the traditional simple random sampling. We investigated the run length properties of the Shewhart–CUSUM with ranked set samples and compared their performance with certain established control charts. It is revealed that the proposed schemes offer better protection against different types of mean shifts than the existing counterparts including classical Shewhart, classical CUSUM, classical combined Shewhart–CUSUM, adaptive CUSUM, double CUSUM, three simultaneous CUSUM, combined Shewhart‐weighted CUSUM, runs rules‐based CUSUM and the mixed exponentially weighted moving average‐CUSUM. Applications on real data sets are also given to demonstrate the implementation simplicity of the proposed schemes Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.