The traditional approach to economic design of control charts is based on the assumption that a process is monitored using a performance variable. However, various types of automatic test equipments recently introduced as a part of factory automation usually measure surrogate variables instead of performance variables that are costly to measure. In this article we propose a model for economic design of a control chart which uses a surrogate variable that is highly correlated with the performance variable. The optimum values of the design parameters are determined by maximizing the total average income per cycle time. Numerical studies are performed to compare the proposed $ar{X}$ control charts with the traditional model using the examples in Panagos et al. (1985).