Visual Inspection for Multiple Flaws: Effects of Long-Term Inspector Experience

Abstract

In a simulation of industrial quality control inspection, performance was tracked over a period of three months using target conditions which had previously been shown to produce performance decrements with multiple flaws. Feedback on performance was supplied to inspectors at the end of each day's work. Results showed that by the end of the period, multiple fault inspection performance was equal to or slightly better, in both accuracy and latency, than previous data obtained with single fault conditions. This finding raises concerns over previous studies which have attempted to address the issue of the supposed performance decrement associated with increasing the size of the target set.