Robust fixture layout with the multi-objective non-dominated ACO/GA approach

Fixture design is an important procedure in many manufacturing operations in terms of maintaining product quality, consistency and assisting the assembly, machining and inspection processes. A robust fixture design approach is presented in this study. It treats fixture layout as a multi-objective optimization problem, which considers both the mean and the variation of the mean localization errors of the machining features in a set-up, and the distance of the location points among the locators to ensure the location is stable and reliable. The non-dominated ACO and GA are proposed to solve this multi-objective problem, and their performances are compared.