Optimal inspection plan for a flexible assembly line

This paper considers an inspection station location problem for a flexible assembly line that consists of multiple stages. By considering the trade-off between locating a station at an ‘early’ stage and at a ‘late’ stage, it has developed some dominance relations on a graph. Based on the dominance relations, the paper then presents an algorithm that finds an optimal inspection plan and a heuristic approach that finds a near-optimal inspection plan. The effectiveness of these two algorithms is demonstrated by two numerical examples.