ESTIMATING ACCEPTANCE-SAMPLING PLANS FOR DEPENDENT PRODUCTION PROCESSES

When acceptance sampling is used to judge the quality of an ongoing pr oduction process, the quality of successive items may exhibit statisti cal dependence that is not accounted for in standard acceptance-sampli ng plans. Computing the probabilities required to design sampling plan s for general dependent processes is often complex, and sometimes intr actable. This paper presents an efficient method for estimating single -sampling attribute plans for any production process model that can be simulated. Numerical illustrations are given.