Continuous inspection planning methodology for quality inspection during product development process

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Robert Heinrich Schmitt
• Subject Area: Production Systems, Operations Management, Quality Management and Factory Planning
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 239896590

Inspection planning is defined as the planning of quality inspections [VDI85, S. 2; DIN08, S.7] taking technical, organizational and economical issues into account. Quality inspections give information on the extent to which a single unit conforms to provided respectively predefined requirements [VDI85, S. 4]. In Research inspection planning is assigned to the field of process planning before production starts [BERN05, S. 14]. It is based on data of processes and planning activities (e.g. blue prints) which are located upstream to inspection planning in the product creation process.However, in order to plan quality inspections of products efficiently inspection planning is also dependent on the integration of information from processes which are subsequent in the product creation process. These data provide information on the current product status in the production and in the field (i.e. product use by the final customer). Except for the consideration of inspection data collected in the production flow (i.e. results of carried out inspections), which is used to determine the necessary amount of inspection, there is so far no systematical and continuous adjustment of the inspection plan based on data from processes, which are subsequent (in terms of the product creation process) to inspection planning (e.g. customer complaints).As the integration of subsequent processes data into inspection planning has been neglected so far the research project KorPus aims to close this research gap. This shall be done by developing an inspection planning system, which is able to learn continuously. A systematical and continuous transfer of the data coming from subsequent processes into inspection planning enables to adapt inspection plans of products to the current situation in the production and in the field. The adaption is not only based on the analysis of inspection data but also on data of error elimination processes, customer complaint processes and other data which provide information on the product s status.By continuously updating the inspection plans inefficient inspections can be revised or rather eliminated. Another essential advantage is that inspections can faster be adjusted to newly occurring errors in the field. Thus, the response time can be reduced in comparison to the status quo. An additional method on an economical comparison between the effort that is related to changing the inspections and the consequences of product defects will be developed in order to minimize the sum of the inspection and the error costs.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants