ABSTRACT
The control of industrial manufacturing processes has long been considered from two different points of view. Statistical process control (SPC), which traces back to the work of Walter Shewhart in the 1920s, was originally developed for discrete manufacturing industries (industries concerned with the production of discrete items). On the other hand, continuous process industries, chemical industries for instance, used various forms of adjust ment strategies administered by automatic controllers. This type of process control became known as engineering process control (EPC) or automatic process control (APC). Separately, both approaches have received enormous interest in the academic literature.
