Monitoring the Ratio of Two Normal Variables Based on Triple Exponentially Weighted Moving Average Control Charts with Fixed and Variable Sampling Intervals

Abstract

In statistical process control (SPC), the ratio of two normal random variables (RZ) is a valuable statistical indicator to be taken as the charting statistic. In this work, we propose a triple exponentially weighted moving average (TEWMA) chart for monitoring the RZ. Additionally, the variable sampling interval (VSI) strategy has been adopted to different control charts by researchers. With the application of this strategy, the VSI-TEWMA-RZ chart is then developed to further improve the performance of the proposed TEWMA-RZ chart. The run length (RL) properties of the proposed TEWMA-RZ and VSI-TEWMA-RZ charts are obtained by the widely used Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations. Through the comparisons with the VSI-EWMA-RZ and the VSI-DEWMA-RZ charts, the VSI-TEWMA-RZ chart is statistically more sensitive than the VSI-EWMA-RZ and the VSI-DEWMA-RZ charts in detecting small and moderate shifts. Moreover, it turned out that the VSI-TEWMA-RZ chart has better performance than the TEWMA-RZ chart on the whole. Furthermore, this paper illustrates the implementation of the proposed charts with an example from the food industry.