Inspection allocation in manufacturing systems: a genetic algorithm approach

In this paper, the authors are concerned with the problem of location of inspection centers in a multistage manufacturing system. A genetic algorithm based approach is developed to determine the location of inspection centers resulting in a minimum expected total cost. The total cost includes inspection, manufacturing and scrapping cost at each stage of the manufacturing process. A penalty cost is included in it to account for a defective item which is not detected by the inspection scheme. A set of test problems are solved using this algorithm