Effects of Measurement Error on Controlling Two Dependent Process Steps

Abstract Imprecise measurements may seriously affect the efficiency of process control and production cost. For two dependent processes, the in-coming quality variable in the first process may influence the out-going quality variable in the second process. To effectively monitor and distinguish the state of the two dependent process steps with imprecise measurements, the EWMA control chart and cause-selecting control chart are constructed by taking account of the measurement errors. The EWMA control chart for imprecise measurements is constructed to monitor small shifts in the process mean on the first step, and the cause-selecting control chart for imprecise measurements, is constructed to monitor small shifts in the process mean in the second step. The effects of imprecise measurements on the performance of the two proposed control charts are examined for the case, where the mean of each process may be changed by the occurrence of a special cause. The performance of the proposed control charts is measured by the average run length. A sensitivity analysis indicates that a larger variation of imprecise measurements leads to a larger average run length for the out-of-control process and a larger average loss.