Robust Tolerance Design of Automotive Body Product with Game Theory

Abstract

Robust tolerance design is an effective way to reduce the production risk. Traditionally, manufacturing cost and product quality are considered to be the optimization objectives. Designers often adopt the single-objective optimization or establish a comprehensive evaluating function combining several optimization objectives with different weights. It may not be desirable as it is difficult to identify the weights and balance the conflicting demands reasonably. This paper presents a kind of game approach to solve the robust tolerance design problem for automotive body products. Instead of designing specific objective functions, some measuring data in the manufacturing process are collected, and a robust game model considering the cost and the quality demand is established by transforming the part and the product information into relevant game components. The Nash bargaining method (NBM) of game theory is adopted to attain a balanced solution. It calls on two players in a game to start negotiation from a reference vector and achieve a trade-off vector as far as possible from the worse situation. Finally, an example of vehicle fender demonstrates the application and the performance of this method.