Some Recent Studies in Statistical Process Control

Abstract

Statistical process control (SPC) charts are widely used in manufacturing industries for quality control and management. They are used in more and more other applications, such as internet traffic monitoring, disease surveillance, and environmental protection. Traditional SPC charts designed for monitoring production lines in manufacturing industries are based on the assumptions that observed data are independent and identically distributed with a parametric in-control distribution. These assumptions, however, are rarely valid in practice. Therefore, recent SPC research focuses mainly on development of new control charts that are appropriate to use without these assumptions. In this article, we briefly introduce some recent studies on nonparametric SPC, control charts for monitoring dynamic processes, and spatio-temporal process monitoring. Control charts developed in these directions have found broad applications in practice.