Inspection planning for mission-critical quality

This paper discusses a class of quality management problems called mission-critical, meaning that the risk of loss due to product failure is so great that no degree of process control is sufficient. Although inspection has fallen out of favor, such circumstances require that complete finished goods inspections be carried out. After reviewing the literature, approaches to managing such inspection tasks are discussed with a particular emphasis on the effects of inspection error. An approach to designing experiments to estimate inspection error probabilities in an industrial setting is described.