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In a production system, it is necessary to apply quality
control methods to prevent the nonconforming products from
reaching the customers. Appropriate inspection is a
significant component of production systems. Determination of
appropriate inspection allocations becomes an interesting
research topic. In this research, we formulate a general
inspection problem, both for a serial and a nonserial
manufacturing system. Serial production systems may be viewed
as a special case of nonserial production systems. We
extended the treatment of the inspection allocation problem to
address the following conditions: (1) the order of production
operations does not have to be known in advance (2) there are
several inspection facilities available to each inspection
point. Traditionally, dynamic programming, 0-1 integer
programming or non-linear programming techniques are used to
solve inspection allocation problem. However, a problem
using these techniques is that the computation time becomes
prohibitively large when the number of potential inspection
stations are twenty or more. In the current research,
inspection allocation models are formulated with the
objective of determining the number and location of
inspection stations which will minimize the expected total
cost per unit produced. The total cost includes fixed
and variable processing cost, inspection cost, material
handling cost, internal failure costs (repair,
replacement, scrap, and rework) and external failure
costs. In this research, we apply the simulated annealing
algorithm to solve the inspection allocation problem. A
comparison shows that the simulated annealing algorithm is a
promising approach to solve inspection allocation problem.
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