A survey of control‐chart pattern‐recognition literature (1991–2010) based on a new conceptual classification scheme

Control Chart Pattern Recognition (CCPR) is a critical task in Statistical Process Control (SPC). Abnormal patterns exhibited in control charts can be associated with certain assignable causes adversely affecting the process stability. Abundant literature treats the detection of different Control Chart Patterns (CCPs). In fact, numerous CCPR studies have been developed according to various objectives and hypotheses. Despite the widespread literature on this topic, efforts to review and analyze research on CCPR are very limited. For this reason, this survey paper proposes a new conceptual classification scheme, based on content analysis method, to classify past and current developments in CCPR research. More than 120 papers published on CCPR studies within 1991–2010 were classified and analyzed. Major findings of this survey include the following. (1) The most popular CCPR studies deal with independently and identically distributed process data. (2) Some recent studies on identification of mean shifts or/and variance shifts of a multivariate process are based on innovative techniques. (3) The percentage of studies that address concurrent pattern identification is increasing. (4) The majority of the reviewed articles use Artificial Neural Network (ANN) approach. Feature‐based techniques, in particular wavelet‐denoise, are investigated for improving the recognition performance of ANN. For the same reason, there is a general trend followed by many authors who propose hybrid, modular and integrated ANN recognizer designs combined with decision tree learning, particle swarm optimization, etc. (5) There are two main categories of performance criteria used to evaluate CCPR approaches: statistical criteria that are related to two conventional Average Run Length (ARL) measures, and recognition‐accuracy criteria, which are not based on these ARL measures. The most applied criteria are recognition‐accuracy criteria, mainly for ANN‐based approaches. Performance criteria which are related to ARL measures are insufficient and inappropriate in the case of concurrent pattern identification. Finally, this paper briefly discusses some future research directions and our perspectives.