Gravitational Search Algorithm: A Novel Optimization for Economic Design in Discontinuous Model

Abstract

Control charts are generally utilized to monitor and maintain the statistical control of a process. Designing a control chart means selection of three parameters such as sample size n, sampling interval h and width of control limits k. To maintain a control chart we have to incur various types of cost such as prevention costs, appraisal costs, internal failure costs, external failure costs and total cost. In economic design the objective is to minimize the total cost associated with control chart. Thus, the economic design is one type of unconstrained optimization problem. Economic designs of X-bar control chart for two types of manufacturing process models namely continuous and discontinuous is provided in the literature. In this project, gravitational search optimization has been utilized for the economic design of X-bar chart for discontinuous process. The results were observed to be comparable to that reported by the literature.