Parameter Estimation Effect of the Homogeneously Weighted Moving Average Chart to Monitor the Mean of Autocorrelated Observations With Measurement Errors

In statistical process monitoring, the usual assumption when designing monitoring schemes is that process parameters are known and have perfect measurements with independent and identically distributed observations. However, in real-life situation, these assumptions rarely hold. Hence, in this paper, the Phase II performance of the homogenously weighted moving average (HWMA) X̅ monitoring scheme under the combined effect of autocorrelation and measurement errors is investigated when the unknown process parameters are estimated from an in-control Phase I dataset. Two models are considered, i.e. the first-order autoregressive model for within-sample autocorrelation and the linear covariate model for (constant and linearly increasing variance) measurement system error. Sampling strategies based on skipping some observations as well as mixing different subgroup samples and taking multiple measurements are implemented to reduce the negative effect of autocorrelation and measurement errors. Since the latter sampling strategies incur costs, as an alternative, increasing the slope coefficient of the linear covariate model compensate the negative effect of measurement errors. The new HWMA X̅ scheme is shown to have some interesting detection abilities as compared to its competitors. A real-life example is used to illustrate the implementation of the proposed monitoring scheme.