Tolerance synthesis adopting a nonlinear programming approach

One of the main objectives in tolerance charting is to determine the working dimensions and tolerances at the lowest cost without violating the blueprint specifications. In view of this, this paper presents a simple dimensional chains identification method. After establishing all necessary equations and constraints, a nonlinear objective function is formulated. Subsequently, all these relationships are submitted to an optimisation software, OPTIVAR written in FORTRAN for the determination of the unknown variables. In addition, an example is incorporated to demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed methodology.