Inspection plan that enables you to accept or reject a particular lot of incoming material based on the data from a representative sample.
For example, you receive a shipment of 10,000 microchips. You either cannot or do not want to inspect the entire shipment. With acceptance sampling you can develop a plan to determine how many microchips you need to examine (sample size) and how many defects are allowed within the sample (acceptance number). In this case, suppose your acceptable quality level (AQL) is 1.5% and the rejectable quality level (RQL) is 5.0%, and you assume alpha = 0.05 and beta = 0.1. Minitab's generated sampling plan indicates that you will need to inspect 206 chips. If 6 or less of the 206 inspected microchips are defective, you will accept the entire shipment. If 7 or more are defective, you will reject the entire shipment.
Acceptance sampling is a major component of quality control and is useful when the cost of testing is high compared to the cost of passing a defective or when testing is destructive. It is a compromise between doing 100% inspection and no inspection at all. Acceptance sampling can be done on attribute or measured quality characteristics.