AN INTEGRATED PROCESS CONTROL PROCEDURE WITH REPEATED ADJUSTMENTS AND EWMA MONITORING UNDER AN IMA(1,1) DISTURBANCE WITH A STEP SHIFT

Statistical process control (SPC) and engineering process control (EPC) are based on different strategies for process quality improvement. SPC re-duces process variability by detecting and eliminating special causes of process variation, while EPC reduces process variability by adjusting compensatory variables to keep the quality variable close to target. Recently there has been need for an integrated process control (IPC) procedure which combines the two strategies. This paper considers a scheme that simultaneously applies SPC and EPC techniques to reduce the variation of a process. The process model under consideration is an IMA(1,1) model with a step shift. The EPC part of the scheme adjusts the process, while the SPC part of the scheme detects the occurrence of a special cause. For adjusting the process repeated adjustment is applied according to the predicted deviation from target. For detecting special causes the exponentially weighted moving average control chart is applied to the observed deviations. It was assumed that the adjustment under the presence of a special cause may increase the process variability or change the system gain. Reasonable choices of parameters for the IPC procedure are considered in the context of the mean squared deviation as well as the average run length.