Tolerance Specification Optimization for Economic and Ecological Sustainability

Paper in proceedings, 2013

In the final stages of product development, dimensional tolerances are specified by designers to ensure high functionality at low costs. A traditional approach to this decision-making process is to minimize economic losses to the manufacturer and the consumer. This paper presents a new approach for tolerance allocation optimization that considers sustainability not only from economic costs but also ecological costs. The framework is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem and explored with a case study on the design of an automotive body panel. Results of the case study include Pareto frontiers of non-dominated optimal solutions along with a parametric study to explore the influence of material choice on the results.