Economic design of screening procedures when the rejected items are reprocessed

In a screening inspection, all of the items are subject to acceptance inspection. If an item fails to meet the predetermined specifications, it is rejected. In this paper, economic screening procedures are considered when the rejected items are reprocessed. It is assumed that the reprocessed and nonreprocessed items are produced by the same manufacturing process and therefore their quality characteristics are identically and independently distributed. Screening procedures based on the performance variable of interest and a variable which is correlated with the performance variable are considered. Cost models are constructed which involve the cost incurred by imperfect quality, reprocessing cost, and inspection cost. Methods of finding the optimal screening procedures are presented and an example is given. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.