A Data-Driven Methodology to Improve Tolerance Allocation Using Product Usage Data

Abstract

Industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution, puts forward new requirements for the sustainable service of products. With the recent advances in measurement technologies, global and local deformations in inaccessible areas can be monitored. Product usage data such as geometric deviation, position deviation, and angular deviation that lead to product functional performance degradation can be continuously collected during the product usage stage. These technologies provide opportunities to improve tolerance design by improving tolerance allocation using product usage data. The challenge lies in how to assess these deviations for identifying relevant field factors and reallocate the tolerance value. In this paper, a data-driven methodology based on the deviation for tolerance analysis is proposed to improve the tolerance allocation. A feature graph of a mechanical assembly is established based on the assembly relationship. The node representation in the feature graph is defined based on the unified Jacobian-torsor model and the node label is calculated by a synthetic evaluation method. A novel hierarchical graph attention networks (HGAT) is proposed to investigate hidden relations between nodes in the feature graph and calculate labels of all nodes. A modification necessity index (MNI) is defined for each tolerance between two nodes based on their labels. An identification of the to-be-modified tolerance method is proposed to specify the tolerance analysis target. A deviation difference matrix is constructed to calculate the MNI of each tolerance for identifying the to-be-modified tolerance value with high priorities for product improvement. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is demonstrated through a case study for improving tolerance allocation of a press machine.