Location and sequencing of imperfect inspection operations in serial multi-stage production systems

An integrated approach to the problem of allocation of inspection effort in multi-stage production systems is presented. The problem addresses multiple inspection operations, different disposition polices and inspection, production and repair errors. Quality and cost transfer functions are developed to model production operations and different types of inspection operations in a unified manner and to facilitate the recursive computations required to evaluate alternative system configurations. The authors formulate the combined inspection location and sequencing problem as a nonlinear mathematical programming problem and solve it with a branch and bound technique, using a heuristic to generate a feasible solution and upper bound. These developments are illustrated with a numerical example.