ROBUST DESIGN OF ASSEMBLY AND MACHINING TOLERANCE ALLOCATIONS

Tolerancing is one of the most important tasks in product and manufact uring process design. The allocation of design tolerances between the components of a mechanical assembly and manufacturing tolerances in th e intermediate machining steps of component fabrication can significan tly affect a product's quality and its robustness. This paper presents a methodology to maximize a product's robustness by appropriately all ocating assembly and machining tolerances. The robust tolerance design problem is formulated as a mixed nonlinear optimization model. A simu lated annealing algorithm is employed to solve the model and an exampl e is presented to illustrate the methodology.