Multi-objective design optimization of automatic fixturing

摘要

Manufacturing is a very competitive environment. In order to keep ahead of other competitors, manufacturers turn to automating more and more aspects of their facilities and processes. Fixturing is an important aspect of tooling that contributes significantly to quality improvement, lead-time reduction and cost minimization. Adequate theory and quantification methods are direly needed for rapid, efficient, and accurate automatic fixturing design for quick changes in production. Minimization of potential energy was successfully shown to generate a set of fixturing locator and clamping points. Convergence was slow for global optimization and adaptive simulated annealing methods. In this paper, Non-Linear Goal Programming is used, as an efficient approach, for solving the multi-levels potential energy optimization problem. The resulting locator and clamping locations for fixture configuration are verified by physical measurements from experimental results. The problem formulation, optimization model, and experiments conducted are presented. Comparison of the multi-objective optimization results with the results from other optimization methods is conducted.