Title: Revealing latent quality information hidden within inspection reports of curtailed tests

Authors: Tamar Gadrich; Emil Bashkansky

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Ort Braude College, P.O. Box 78, Karmiel, Israel. ' Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Ort Braude College, P.O. Box 78, Karmiel, Israel

Abstract: The desire to accelerate inspection procedures and reduce inspection costs often results in tests being curtailed. Even though every item is meant to undergo a number of independent/dependent tests, once an item, e.g., item #XXX fails to pass a test, further tests/inspections are terminated. Thus, the empirical data existing at the end of the inspection procedure does not contain information about item #XXX|s ability to pass the cancelled tests. Information mining statistical tools can be used to uncover the latent quality information hidden within these data. This paper proposes altering curtailed testing procedures (e.g., changing the order of the tests or detectability levels), in order to estimate the theoretical joint probabilities (latent quality information) concerning an item|s ability to pass a part of, or the entire sequence of tests. The effectiveness of the proposed procedures is then evaluated using simulated data.

Keywords: quality categories; latent quality information; curtailed inspection; information mining; defects detection; inspection reports; test results.

DOI: 10.1504/IJQET.2011.043170

International Journal of Quality Engineering and Technology, 2011 Vol.2 No.4, pp.306 - 327

Published online: 21 Feb 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article