A review of the current literature in inspection sampling optimization

This paper reviews the literature on the optimization of inspection sampling. Inspection sampling is critical to the prevention of nonconformance from reaching production. Optimization can be used to determine a sampling strategy yielding the best tradeoff between the risks of nonconformance and the sampling costs for avoiding the risks. This paper performs a literature review on the research that contributes to this problem and, accordingly, recommends a few research directions to the solution. Areas of research reviewed in this paper include economics of quality inspection, probabilistic risk models, inspection sampling, statistical models of inspection sampling, cost optimization, and inspection versus reliability.