where Zt is the EWMA at time t; Yt the observed value being monitored; and λ a smoothing constant between 0 and 1.
Z0 is the target value or the historical mean of the process. If λ is close to 1, the statistic has little memory, giving great deal of weight to the recent points, whereas if λ is close to 0, the statistic gives high importance to historical data. Moreover, if λ = 1, the chart becomes a Shewhart control chart [18]. Therefore, λ must be chosen as a function of the type of shift to be detected. The estimated variance of the EWMA is approximately the following: