Manufacturing environment-oriented robust tolerance optimization method

Tolerance design has a great impact on the cost and quality of a product. Previous research focused on process tolerances or robust tolerance design with little consideration on real manufacturing context. This paper presents a nonlinear method for robust tolerance design based on the real manufacturing context in three stages. The objective function to be minimized is the total manufacturing cost. The constraint equations for the optimization model are also deduced, which select suitable manufacturing processes based on the manufacturing environment. Simulation annealing (SA) is used for the nonlinear optimization. The approach is finally illustrated by a practical example. The results of the comparison with different models indicate that the proposed approach is more effective with the manufacturing resource. The robust and reliable tolerance can be obtained.