Since the first acceptance sampling plans have been developed almost 80 years ago, a number of selection principles have emerged. The majority of these principles is characterized by the fact that they look upon producer and consumer as two opposing parties. However, in many occasions, e.g., in final inspection, producer and consumer represent the same party and, therefore, the used sampling plan should not make an attempt to discriminate between their interests. In this case the interest is to avoid wrong decisions, i.e., reject product of sufficient quality and accept product of insufficient quality. Thus, the natural objective in these cases is to use the overall risk for a wrong decision as optimization criteria. This is the case with so-called “minimum risks sampling plans”, which are reviewed in this paper so as to make them better known to those responsible for quality control.
