Allocation of Screening Inspection Effort---A Dynamic-Programming Approach

A general screening inspection program is developed in which inspection levels and the locations of inspection points are treated as variables. It is shown that the function representing the total of inspection and scrap costs will be minimized by an extreme-point solution, thus the minimum-cost inspection program will lie in a relatively restricted subset of all possible allocations. Application of a computational procedure based on dynamic-programming allows the minimum-cost program to be readily determined for instances in which the requirement for inspection is the maintenance of a specified quality level or when a linear cost may be associated with outgoing defective material.