An Economic‐Statistical Design of Moving Average Control Charts

Control charts are important tools of statistical quality control. In 1956, Duncan first proposed the economic design of x‐control charts to control normal process means and insure that the economic design control chart actually has a lower cost, compared with a Shewhart control chart. An moving average (MA) control chart is more effective than a Shewhart control chart in detecting small process shifts and is considered by some to be simpler to implement than the CUSUM. An economic design of MA control chart has also been proposed in 2005. The weaknesses to only the economic design are poor statistics because it does not consider type I or type II errors and average time to signal when selecting design parameters for control chart. This paper provides a construction of an economic‐statistical model to determine the optimal parameters of an MA control chart to improve economic design. A numerical example is employed to demonstrate the model’s working and its sensitivity analysis is also provided.