Repetitive testing of multiple products with limited capacity

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a model‐based methodology for the repetitive testing of multiple products with limited capacity, when the testing process is imperfect.Design/methodology/approach – In a repetitive testing process, items that are classified as non‐conforming may be conforming, resulting in excessive scrapping of good items. Failed items are commonly retested to reduce scrapping costs. This paper develops a stochastic optimization formulation and its solution to determine the numbers of repetitive tests for multiple products that minimize the sum of the expected scrapping costs and variable testing costs, subject to a testing equipment capacity constraint. It also develops a procedure to estimate the parameter values that are used in the optimization formulation.Findings – Computational experiments are conducted to evaluate the estimation and solution procedure and to understand the effect of testing machine capacity on the optimal total cost. These results demonstrate the ...