Inaccuracies in workpiece location lead to errors in position and orientation of machined features on the workpiece, and strongly affect the assemblability and the final quality of the product. The accurate positioning of workpiece on a fixture is influenced by rigid body displacements and rotations of the workpiece due to locator errors. In this paper, a new mathematical modeling of a fixture - workpiece system is proposed to establish the relationship between the workpiece location error and its sources. For the purpose of eliminating the locator errors of the fixtured workpiece, the resultant errors due to several sources are modeled in the locator error. Then the displacement and rotation errors of the located workpiece can be compensated by adjusting the length of locators. The proposed method is proper for error analysis based on both worst case and statistical approaches. The application of the presented method is illustrated through presenting an example and the computational results are compared with the simulation results of the case study in a CAD system.
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