A SHRUNKEN CYCLIC INSPECTION SCHEDULE FOR DETERIORATING PRODUCTION STAGES

A single inspection facility is capable of multiple inspection tasks. This facility could be used for detecting out-of-specification product ion stages in multistage production systems. The purpose is to schedul e the inspection over the different production stages so as to minimiz e the fraction of nonconforming items produced. A heuristic solution i s proposed. The schedule is based on a relaxation of the original inte ger nonlinear scheduling problem. The relaxed problem provides upper b ound and optimal sharing of the inspection efforts. Alternative cyclic schedules are then generated, shrunken and evaluated. The procedure p erformance is examined and further extensions are discussed.