ECONOMIC ACCEPTANCE SAMPLING BY VARIABLES WITH QUADRATIC QUALITY COSTS

An economic model is developed, to assist in the selection of minimum cost acceptance sampling plans by variables. The quadratic Taguchi los s function is adopted to model the cost of accepting items, with quali ty characteristics deviating from the target value. The case of a norm ally distributed quality characteristic with known variance is examine d, and a simple and efficient optimization algorithm is proposed. Comp arisons with other methods of deriving sampling plans reveal that the cost penalties for using an inappropriate plan may be very large.