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 production stages in multistage production systems. The purpose is to schedule the inspection over the different production stages so as to minimize the fraction of nonconforming items produced. A heuristic solution is proposed. The schedule is based on a relaxation of the original integer nonlinear scheduling problem. The relaxed problem provides upper bound and optimal sharing of the inspection efforts. Alternative cyclic schedules are then generated, shrunken and evaluated. The procedure performance is examined and further extensions are discussed.