Quality control and improvement for multistage systems: A survey

A multistage system refers to a system consisting of multiple components, stations or stages required to finish the final product or service. Multistage systems are very common in practice and include a variety of modern manufacturing and service systems. In most cases, the quality of the final product or service produced by a multistage system is determined by complex interactions among multiple stages—the quality characteristics at one stage are not only influenced by local variations at that stage, but also by variations propagated from upstream stages. Multistage systems present significant challenges, yet also opportunities for quality engineering research. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief survey of emerging methodologies for tackling various issues in quality control and improvement for multistage systems including modeling, analysis, monitoring, diagnosis, control, inspection and design optimization.