Design issues for adaptive control charts

Adaptive control charts allow the components of the quality-monitoring scheme to vary in order to obtain improved performance over non-adaptive control charts. Research has centered on components such as the sample size, time between samples, warning limits, and control limits and has recommended a variety of schemes, many of which are optimal in some sense. In practice, there are many other adaptive schemes that are near optimal, which will still yield considerable improvement over non-adaptive control charts. In addition, the impact of parameter estimation on adaptive control chart performance must be taken into consideration. Based on the simulation results shown here, adaptive control charts should only be used for mature processes, where a sufficient amount of Phase I data have been obtained to ensure that the estimated control limits are accurate. When evaluating control chart performance, we consider initial state performance measures for simplicity and note that the conclusions obtained here apply to steady-state performance measures. The evaluation of performance measures is easily handled by the Markov chain approach detailed in the Appendix. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.