An expert system approach to quality control

This paper describes the basic actions proposed for quality inspection. These actions involve structuring a Decision Supporting Expert System (DSES) to help with those decisions related to the preliminary activities for inspection development—most of them relating to determining of the need or convenience of carrying out the inspection itself. Once the opportunity to carry it out is defined, the expert system helps the user to select the type of inspection to adopt from amongst: (1) automatic or sensorial inspection; (2) inspection by samples or complete; (3) acceptance or rectifying and, in the most relevant module, (4) inspection by attributes or by variables. The complementary documentation of the DSES contains the directions to operate it, the rules and qualifiers that make up the system, as well as the results achieved through its experimental implementation. q 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.