Integrated design method to improve producibility based on product key characteristics and assembly sequences

摘要

Producibility improvement is a major challenge for design and manufacturing firms. For aircraft or car body, this improvement has to go through a better product assemblability. In order to reach this goal, effects of manufacturing variations have to be managed. Two questions are asked about variation reduction: how to control effect of variations on functional requirements and what product characteristics are most sensitive to variations. No global answers exist to these questions. Therefore, we propose to describe in this paper an industrial method. The main idea of this method is that geometrical variation flows belong to the assembly process. During the preliminary design, the first step of our method is to identify where are the Key Characteristics for the product. The second step of the method performs a qualitative product analysis in order to eliminate the worst assembly sequences. At last a quantitative analysis allows to select the most promising assembly sequences. This integrated method has been applied with success to aircraft assembly.