Tolerance allocation affects product design, manufacturing, and quality. This paper takes product design, manufacturing, and quality into account simultaneously. It introduces a concurrent engineering method for tolerance allocation using GA. A nonlinear optimization model was constructed to implement the method. The model minimizes the combination of quality loss and manufacturing cost simultaneously in a single objective function by setting both process tolerances and design tolerances simultaneously. The purpose of the model is to balance manufacturing cost and quality loss to achieve near-optimal design and process tolerances simultaneously for minimum combined manufacturing cost and quality loss over the life of the product. In the present work, genetic algorithm, one of the emerged optimization techniques is applied successfully to determine the optimal tolerances at the minimum manufacturing and quality loss cost. An example is taken from the literature to explain the proposed methodology. The application of the proposed methodology is demonstrated on a simple mechanical assembly with different tolerance stack-up conditions.
Tolerance design, Function tolerances, Manufacturing tolerances, Cost, Quality, Genetic algorithm
