The basic purpose of the economic design of a control chart is to find the optimum values for control chart parameters to minimise the total cost of process control. This paper deals with the joint economic design of X-bar and R charts. In the present work, simulated annealing which is one of the global optimisation techniques has been employed for the joint economic design. The optimum cost values obtained are compared with that of the earlier designs based on conventional optimisation techniques and are observed to be less.