Modeling of the manufacturing and assembly costs for tolerance determination in selective assembly.

Abstract

The results serve as a first proof-of-concept for the combined tolerance-cost-time problem. This model can be used for process selection during process planning. Most importantly, this approach provides a mathematical basis to selective assembly. In this dissertation, the contradicting trends are modeled as a series of approximate bi-criteria optimization problems. Each of these problems is solved by developed heuristic methods that generate efficient solutions. These models are verified on several generated data sets. The manufacturing cost-tolerance optimization problem for tolerance determination is quite extensively published. However, the total manufacturing time to assembly optimization problem is not studied very extensively. Especially, the combined optimization of these apparently contradicting trends has not been studied very much in literature.