Guidelines for the application of adaptive control charting schemes

A comprehensive performance study and comparison of several adaptive statistical process control procedures is presented. These adaptive control chart procedures are modifications to standard Shewhart control charts that include changing the sampling interval, the sample size or both according to rules based on the value of the sample statistic. Adaptive control techniques are known to improve the performance of the standard Shewhart control charts. In this paper we develop a four-state adaptive sample size control chart and several variations of a three-state combined adaptive sample size and sampling interval control chart. We then compare these new schemes with the previously developed schemes, the two-state adaptive sampling interval, the two-state adaptive sample size and two-state combined adaptive sample size and sampling interval control chart, three-state adaptive sample size control chart and non-adaptive Shewhart control charts. These results show that the addition of the third and fourth states on the adaptive control chart schemes improve the control chart performance; however, the improvement is relatively modest.