Economic Design of a Moving Average Control Chart with Multiple Assignable Causes when Two Failures Occur

The economic design of control charts has been researched for over four decades since Duncan proposed the concept in 1956. Few studies, however, have focused attention on the economic design of a moving average (MA) control chart. An MA control chart is more effective than the Shewhart chart in detecting small process shifts. This paper provides an economic model for determining the optimal parameters of an MA control chart with multiple assignable causes and two failures in the production process. These parameters consist of the sample size, the spread of the control limit and the sampling interval. A numerical example is shown and the sensititivy analysis shows that the magnitude of shift, rate of occurrence of assignable causes and increasing cost when the process is out of control have a more significant effect on the loss cost, meaning that one should more carefully estimate these values when conducting an economic analysis.