Holistic Approach and Advanced Techniques & Tools for Tolerance Analysis & Synthesis

This paper presents a holistic Methodology on Design and the associated Toolset developed to enable its implementability; the approach is based on comprehensively addressing effects of Variability. In Design, Tolerancing for Fit and for Function is one of the most crucial and interlinked efforts during technology and product development. Tolerancing for Function, especially, has been little addressed, and at best rudimentarily, by the engineering community. This is because to do so appropriately and adequately requires local and global approaches to enable decision making of nominals and tolerances. For this, one not only needs techniques and tools for properly conducting Contribution Analysis and Variability Analysis for any given relationship and set of input variabilities, but one must be able to quantitatively propagate the thousands of variabilities to a few resulting performance variabilities. Lacking these capabilities, as a user-friendly computational toolset that is ‘complete’, has been the fundamental level barrier to holistic Tolerancing. This has now been provided by our breakthrough Toolset. Quantification and decision making require yet more; the Methodology addresses those and putting relevant Design Practices in context. The Methodology has been implemented.