Statistical Process Control using Shewhart Control Charts with Supplementary Runs Rules

The aim of this paper is to present the basic principles and recent advances in the area of statistical process control charting with the aid of runs rules. More specifically, we review the well known Shewhart type control charts supplemented with additional rules based on the theory of runs and scans. The motivation for this article stems from the fact that during the last decades, the performance improvement of the Shewhart charts by exploiting runs rules has attracted continuous research interest. Furthermore, we briefly discuss the Markov chain approach which is the most popular technique for studying the run length distribution of run based control charts.