Design for Robustness Based on Manufacturing Variation Patterns

This paper addresses interacting manufacturing errors and their impact on the design robustness and constraint activity. Manufacturing errors often affect design variables with characteristic patterns. This paper defines the Manufacturing Variation Pattern (MVP) to represent this characteristic and investigates its effects. The application of the concept of MVP to design optimization leads to an improved robust optimum. The design of molded gears with minimum transmission error illustrates the proposed scheme’s effectiveness. Our model readily accommodates correlation among dimensional errors and significantly reduces performance variation.