Monitoring a Multiple Stream Filling Operation Using Fractional Samples

This article considers a multiple stream process where it is possible to monitor only a fraction of the total streams at a given time. This situation is of interest in those processes where the speed of production is great and includes a large number of streams, but the ability to monitor the process is not fully automated. An adaptive monitoring approach is applied to a 52 stream filling operation. The adaptive fractional-sampling approach is shown to give superior results to the fixed fraction scheme and provides a great deal of flexibility in monitoring systems with a large number of independent streams.