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ABSTRACT
Tolerance allocation plays a major role in design, manufacturing and assembly of individual components of any product. Relaxed tolerance leads to low manufacturing cost and poor quality while strict tolerance leads to higher costs and superior quality. Hence the design engineer has to decide to draw a compromise between the

manufacturing and quality costs of an assembly, while assigning the tolerance for individual components of the assembly. In the present thesis, tolerance synthesis of various mechanical assemblies using three evolutionary algorithms, namely Genetic Algorithms, Differential Evolution and Particle Swarm Optimization are examined. The test assemblies considered in this study are pistoncylinder, wheel-mounting and rotor-key assemblies. In a piston-cylinder assembly, both the components are manufactured using different manufacturing processes and having only one assembly response function, where as in the wheel-mounting assembly, all the components are manufactured by a single

manufacturing process. Moreover, this assembly possesses two assembly response functions. Finally, in rotor-key assembly, each component is processed using a different manufacturing process. The rotor-key assembly has only one assembly response function. Geometrical tolerance is also considered while allocating the tolerance for rotor-key assembly, with and without position control.

vii In the present work, the following stack-up conditions, namely Worst Case Scenario, Estimated Mean Shift, Spotts Modified Criterion and Root Sum Square criterion are considered during allocation of tolerances. The tolerance synthesis problem is treated as a

constrained optimization problem with the objective function of minimizing the total cost. The problem is attempted using three evolutionary algorithms, namely GA, DE and PSO and the author is successful in obtaining good results. The effectiveness of the results is thoroughly examined using computer simulations. Evolutionary algorithms are able to find time efficient and near-optimal tolerance values for various mechanical assemblies and the methods proposed for tolerance allocation problem by the author in the present thesis yielded better results in terms of total cost for the assembly in this area of study. The methods would yield better results for complex assemblies. Keywords: Tolerance allocation, Piston-Cylinder assembly, Wheelmount assembly, Rotor-Key assembly, Worst Case Condition,

Estimated Mean Shift criterion, Spoots Modified criterion, Root Sum Square criterion, Genetic Algorithm, Differential Evolution, Particle Swarm Optimization.

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PAPERS PUBLISHED BASED ON THIS Ph.D WORK Journals:

1. Simultaneous Tolerance Synthesis for Manufacturing and Quality using Evolutionary Algorithms, published in

International Journal of Applied Evolutionary Computation, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp 1-20, April-June 2011. 2. Simultaneous Tolerance Synthesis for Manufacturing and Quality using GA and PSO, International Journal on Information Processing, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp 81-87 , Mar. 2011. 3. A Genetic Algorithm Approach for Simultaneous Tolerance Synthesis for Manufacturing and Quality with Different StackUp Conditions, International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, Vol. 3, No. 9, pp 11691188, 2008.

Conferences:
1. Tolerance Analysis Of Mechanical Assemblies Using AutoCAD and MATLAB, National Conference on Factory Automation, Robotics and Soft Computing,18-19, January 2007,NIT

Warangal, pp.189-194 2. Simultaneous Tolerance Synthesis for Manufacturing and Quality using MATLAB, Proceeding of National Conference on Challenges in 2020 Mechanical Engineering

perspective(CITTMEP-2008),March 14 & 15,2008 , pp.22 28.