Economic control and inspection policies for high-speed unreliable production systems

In this paper, we consider a high-speed production process, which produces defects at a known rate while in control. When the process goes out of control, it produces defects at a higher rate. In this study, we revisit the role of the distribution of the process in-control time when managing such systems. Specifically, we focus on two management schemes, a control policy and an inspection policy. In the control policy, when the number of defects produced reaches a threshold, the process is stopped and inspected. In contrast, in the inspection policy, the process is stopped and inspected periodically. We derive the operating characteristics of the system and devise schemes for finding the optimal policy parameters for each policy. We also investigate the behavior of the optimal policy parameters, compare the performances of the control and inspection policies and identify the environments in which each of these policies out performs the other one using a numerical experiment.