Calculation of Total Cost, Tolerance Based on Taguchi's, Asymmetric Quality Loss Function Approach

Abstract

Problem statement: Current world market force the manufacturing sectors to develop high quality product and process design with minimum possible cost. About 80% of problems in production units may be attributed to 20% of design tolerance causes. While design typically represents the smallest actual cost elements in products (around 5%), it leverages the largest cost influence (around 70%). So design engineers continuously stumble upon problem of design for high quality performance with lower cost. Objectives of this study where to: (i) simultaneous selection of design and manufacturing tolerance (ii) minimization of total cost (sum of the manufacturing cost and Taguchi’s asymmetric quality cost) (iii) minimum cost and its machining tolerance. Approach: Rotor key base assembly was considered as case study to optimize the minimization of assembly total cost and machining tolerance. New global nonlinear optimization techniques called pattern search algorithm had been implemented to find optimal tolerance allocation and total cost. Results: In this study minimum cost arrived was 45.15 Cr and its corresponding tolerances for machining process turning, drilling, face milling, face milling and drilling where 0.063, 0.0508, 0.2127, 0.2127, 0.2540 mm respectively at worst case conditions. Conclusion: Results indicated that optimization by integer programming, sequential quadratic programming and exhaustive search, nonlinear programming, genetic algorithm, simulated annealing, fuzzy logic, number set theory and Monte Carlo simulation did not give much least total cost and also predicted that pattern search algorithm was robust method. Second the method, generally termed as concurrent tolerance synthesis was well suited for engineering environment, where high quality products with low total cost were designed and manufactured.