INSPECTION ALLOCATION IN MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS USING STOCHASTIC SEARCH TECHNIQUES

Quality is the hallmark of a competitive product, It is necessary to u se inspection stations to check product quality and process performanc e. In this paper, we are concerned with the problem of location of ins pection stations in a multistage manufacturing system. We present two stochastic search algorithms for solving this problem, one based on Si mulated Annealing and the other on Genetic Algorithms. These algorithm s are developed to determine the location of inspection stations resul ting in a minimum expected total cost in a multistage manufacturing sy stem, The total cost includes inspection, processing and scrapping cos t at each stage of the production process. A penalty cost is also incl uded in it to account for a defective item which is not detected by th e inspection scheme. A set of test examples are solved using these alg orithms, We also compare performance of these two algorithms.