Combined application of Shewhart and cumulative sum R chart for monitoring process dispersion

Abstract

This study analyzes the performance of combined applications of the Shewhart and cumulative sum (CUSUM) range R chart and proposes modifications based on well-structured sampling techniques, the extreme variations of ranked set sampling, for efficient monitoring of changes in the process dispersion. In this combined scheme, the Shewhart feature enables quick detection of large shifts from the target standard deviation while the CUSUM feature takes care of small to moderate shifts from the target value. We evaluate the numerical performance of the proposed scheme in terms of the average run length, standard deviation of run length, the average ratio average run length, and average extra quadratic loss. The results show that the combined scheme can detect changes in the process that were small or large enough to escape detection by the lone Shewhart R chart or CUSUM R chart, respectively. We present a comparison of the proposed schemes with several dispersion charts for monitoring changes in process variability. The practical application of the proposed scheme is demonstrated using real industrial data.