Location of quality-control stations in manufacturing systems: a simulated annealing approach

Quality is the hallmark of a competitive product. It is necessary to use inspection stations to check product quality and process performance. In this paper, we are concerned with the problem of location of inspection stations in a manufacturing system. A simulated annealing approach is developed to determine the location of inspection centers resulting in a minimum expected total cost in a multistage serial production system. The total cost includes inspection, processing, and scrapping costs at each stage of the production process. A penalty cost is also included in it to account for a defective item which is not detected by the inspection scheme. A set of test examples is solved using a simulated annealing algorithm