A Tutorial on Probabilistic Risk Assessment for Net Package Contents – Mini Paper Appearing in Fall 1997 Newsletter

Abstract: There are several regulations in place to monitor the content of packaged goods. The package filling process associated with these goods are characterized by a mean fill level and inherent process variability. For such processes, producers are concerned with the risk of being in violation of package content regulations based on a sample of product taken from store shelves. We examine two cases of such regulations. The first case is when regulations are based on the sample mean of the package contents and the second case is when they are based on the individual package content values. We also show how to calculate probabilities for passing these two cases using the standard normal and binomial cumulative distribution functions.

Keywords: Mean - Standard deviation - Normal distribution - Binomial distribution