On the constrained economic design of control charts: a literature review

The economic design is an appealing approach to settle the design parameters of a control chart. Unfortunately, the economic models to design control charts have been scarcely implemented by quality practitioners due to the simplifying assumptions when representing the multifaceted complexity and constraints present within manufacturing and transactional environments. Although there has been an increasing scepticism about the economic models usefulness in practice, some recent studies proposed in literature face the problem of the control charts economic design from a new point of view: the objective is to achieve a well balanced trade-off between the operational and the statistical aspects. Under this perspective, the economic design problem can be intended in a broader sense as the constrained design of a SPC inspection procedure. This paper presents a discussion of some recent trends in the economic design stream of research and outlines the importance of considering the constraints related to SPC resources availability and modelling the occurrence of random shifts.