Journal of Engineering Design Vol. 19, No.

1, February 2008, 113

A comparative study on quality design of xture planning for sheet metal assembly
BING LI*, YING HU, HUI TANG, HONGJIAN YU and HONG HU
Shenzhen Graduate School, Harbin Institute of Technology, PR China
Fixture plays an important role in enhancing the weld quality of the sheet metal assembly process. However, the traditional experience-based xturing scheme and the purely optimal xturing scheme are often sensitive to location uctuation of the designed locators. In this paper, the three quality design models of a non-linear programming model, a polynomial response surface methodology (RSM) and a neural network (NN)-enhanced RSM are presented for xture planning of a sheet metal assembly with resistance spot weld. In the non-linear programming model, both performance and variance are considered in the formulation of objective function. The polynomial RSM is used to t a feasible response surface by 3k fractional factorial design and analysis of the variance; by inspecting the inuence of each design variable, one can gain insight into the existence of multiple design choices and select the optimum design based on more factors. NN can be used to condently generate additional design points added to the original data set to form the enhanced data set; the NN-enhanced RSM can help to improve the accuracy. An industrial case study of a car door assembly is used to illustrate the feasibility of the presented quality design models. This work provides a basis for improving the quality of the body-in-white assembly process in the design phase. Keywords: Fixture planning; Sheet metal assembly; Quality design

1.

Introduction

The process of automotive body assembly involves joining sheet metal components to form a body-in-white assembly. The assembly xture plays an important role in sheet metal assembly. In the assembly process, each panel is positioned relative to the other panels and secured in place. After being properly positioned, the panels are welded together (Hu and Wu 1992, Ceglarek et al. 1993). In the assembly with resistance spot welding, a xture conguration design is developed to reduce the deformation of each workpiece owing to the welding and, hence, to reduce the dimensional variation of the assembly. In recent years, work has focused on automating the xture design for deformable sheet metal assemblies. A method that combines non-linear programming and nite-element analysis was proposed to design and evaluate xtures for deformable sheet metal workpieces (Rearick et al. 1993). Cai et al. (1996) set up a principle and algorithm for an assembly xturing scheme for deformable sheet metal

*Corresponding author. Email: libing.sgs@hit.edu.cn

Journal of Engineering Design ISSN 0954-4828 print/ISSN 1466-1837 online 2008 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09544820601058634

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with resistance spot welding and developed a xture design package. A new locating scheme with total locating and direct locating for sheet metal assembly with laser welding has been developed (Li et al. 2001, Li and Shiu 2001). The robust design method, also called the Taguchi method, pioneered by Dr Genichi Taguchi, greatly improves engineering productivity. By consciously considering the noise factors (environmental variation during the products usage, manufacturing variation, and component deterioration) and the cost of failure in the eld, the robust design method helps ensure customer satisfaction (Jiang and Allada, 2005). Robust design focuses on improving the fundamental function of the product or process, thus facilitating exible designs and concurrent engineering. Indeed, it is the most powerful method available to reduce product cost, improve quality, and simultaneously reduce development interval (Lacey and Steele, 2006). A robust xture design for three-dimensional rigid workpieces by a variational method was developed (Cai et al. 1997). For exible sheet metal parts there is no closed-form solution between the source variation and the output variation (Sderberg et al. 2006). As the optimized xturing scheme does not guarantee less sensitivity to the location uctuation of designed locators, quality xturing design for sheet metals is to obtain a xturing scheme with consideration of both performance and robustness. In order to control the weld quality, it is of great importance to develop a xture scheme with less sensitivity to control variables and noise effects. However, there have been few reports on the quality design of xture planning for sheet metal assembly. Therefore, in-depth research on the quality design of xture planning for exible sheet metal assembly is desired. In a separate paper by the authors (Li et al. 2006), a non-linear programming model was developed for xture planning of sheet metal assembly with consideration of the trade-off of both performance factor and robustness factor. The genetic algorithm (GA) is used as the optimal method. GAs are adaptive heuristic search algorithms premised on the evolutionary ideas of natural selection and genetics. The basic concept of GAs is designed to simulate processes in a natural system necessary for evolution, specically those that follow the principles of survival of the ttest. As such, they represent an intelligent exploitation of a random search within a dened search space to solve a design optimization problem. The advantage of the response surface methodology (RSM) is that the procedure can help engineers and designers to identify the predominant variables and to obtain a better understanding of the overall system (Montgomery 1995). The author has developed a robust design model for sheet metal assembly with laser welding (Li et al. 2003). In the modelling of the robust xturing design, an improved robust design method, the two-stage RSM, is developed. The rst step of this method determines the robust design space. A combined objective including both robustness and performance is dened. In the second stage, a second-order response surface model is tted by 3k fractional factorial design. Suppose a second-order tting surface is used, then at least three levels of each variable are required for estimating all of the coefcients. Two experimental options, the central composite design and the BoxBehnken design (BBD), can be used as the fraction of the 3k factorial design that considers it to be rotatable or near-rotatable (Montgomery 1995). After a tted polynomial model is established, a response surface analysis is necessary to determine whether the model reects the true relationship of the problem. Based on the analysis, the inuential variables that are important information for the designer will be also found. To improve the accuracy of the robust xturing solution with the RSM, a neural network (NN)-enhanced method is presented in this paper and a comparative study is carried out based on the aforementioned quality design methods. The paper is organized as follows. In section 2 a brief review of quality design methods of the non-linear programming model and RSM is given. Then a NN-enhanced RSM is developed in section 3, and a case study and discussions are presented in section 4. The nal section presents a summary.

Quality design of xture planning

2.

Review of the quality design model for sheet metal xture planning

Quality design on xture conguration for sheet metal assembly is described as follows. A typical 321 locating scheme is enough to locate a rigid body with the minimum number of locators. However, since sheet metal is compliant, the 321 locating scheme cannot satisfactorily meet a close tolerance specication (Li et al. 2001). In order to obtain better assembly quality in the assembly process with resistance spot welding, an N21 (N > 3) locating scheme has been proposed (Cai et al. 1996). The N21 locating scheme is appropriate to be applied in sheet metal assembly, where the 21 locating as shown in gure 1 is generally implemented by a four-way pin and a two-way pin. In the assembly process, the locations of the two pins are arranged on the longer edge of the sheet metal and the distance between the two pins is set further apart, so that the 21 locating is treated as being predetermined. The design variables in the quality design model are the N designed locators, which are applied to restrain the primary deformation. The nite element approach is used to analyse the relationship between load and variation, the sheet metal parts are modelled with a plate element, two pins of the assembled parts are set as constraints in the x and y directions of the xturing plane, and the designed locators are set as constraints in vertical directions of the xturing plane. The resistance spot welds are modelled with a spot weld feature of ANSYS software, which is based on the internal multipoint constraints approach. This approach takes into account effects of the spot weld radius input by the user. Each new spot weld set consists of a beam element and two nodeto-surface multipoint constraints contact pairs. Each node-to-surface pair will generate six constraint equations. One can choose either a rigid element or a deformable element to link the spot weld surfaces. An illustrative door assembly and its nite element model are shown in gures 2 and 3. A root square approach representing the average variation of the concerned nodes on the panels is used to evaluate the objective function f (x) as shown in equation (1).
n

f (x) =
i=1

i2

(1)

As shown in equation (2), a scalarization approach of linear combination method is used in the design model with consideration of multi-objectives. minimize F (x) = (1 )E(f (x)) + (f (x)) i = 1, 2, . . . , n (2) and xL x xU

subject to E(gi (x)) + i (gi (x)) 0 (f (x)) U

Figure 1. Two pins of a simple assembly.

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Figure 2. Illustrative diagram of a door assembly.

where U refers to the upper limit of the variance, xL and xU stand for the lower and upper limits of the design variables, the quantity i > 0 is a prescribed feasibility index for the ith original constraint, 0 < < 1 is the factor weighting the two objectives, and and are normalization factors. The above design model can be converted to a pure mean value minimization problem for = 0 or a pure standard deviation minimization problem for = 1. Taylors series and a central nite difference approach are used to simplify the mathematical expectation Ef and variance f of the performance. Substituting these simplications into

Figure 3. Finite element model of a door assembly.

Quality design of xture planning

equation (2) we can obtain the objective function of the quality design model as shown in equation (3): f (M) minimize F (x) = (1 ) +

N i=1

fi+1 fi1 |2 h|

(3)

where M refers to the means of the design variables, N is the number of designed locators, fi+1 and fi1 refer to the objective functions corresponding to the two neighbouring nodes xi+1 and xi1 of the node i on the nite element model, and h represents the mesh size on the design area.

3. A neural network-enhanced response surface methodology 3.1 Polynomial-based response surface methodology The approach of the RSM is to perform a series of experiments, based on numerical analyses or physical experiments, for a prescribed set of design points, and to construct a global approximation of the measured quantity over the design space. The RSM expresses the objective and constraint by simple functions using regression techniques. The procedures of the polynomial-based RSM are described as follows: rst, the design of a set of experiments that will yield adequate and reliable measurements of the response; second, the determination of a mathematical model that best ts the data collected from the designed experiments by conducting appropriate tests of hypotheses concerning the models parameters; and, nally, a determination of the optimal settings of the experimental factors that produce the minimum (or maximum) value of the response. Assuming that the input variables are xi (i = 1, 2, . . . , n), which includes both the design and noise variables, a second-order polynomial approximation of the predicted response function is shown in equation (4):
n n1 n n

y = 0 +
i=1

i xi +
i=1 j >i

ij xi xj +
i=1

ii xi2

(4)

where i , ij and ii are estimated parameters, n is the number of input variables, and y is the response function. Designs for response surface analysis are usually based on two-level or three-level factorials according to whether a rst-order or second-order surface is to be tted. A 3k fractional factorial design is used for tting a second-order model of the response surfaces. As a spherical design a BBD is employed, which can give a complete estimation of the coefcients in the tted model. 3.2 Neural network-enhanced response surface methodology NNs have received much attention in engineering applications in the past decade, because they are highly exible and have the ability to be trained, using user-supplied data, to map complex surfaces. The NN can be trained with data from any source-empirical, experimental or analytical system. Training is accomplished by adjusting weights on the internal connections of the network through dened training algorithms. The training is a cyclic process in which the weights and biases are repeatedly adjusted until an accurate mapping of the response data is obtained. Once trained, the NN is then able to predict the responses for other points in the

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design space. The back-propagation is a gradient descent method of training in that it uses gradient information to modify the network weights to decrease the value of the error function on subsequent tests of the inputs. Back-propagation makes use of a mathematical trick when the network is simulated, yielding in just two traversals of the network (once forward, and once back) both the difference between the desired and actual output, and the derivatives of this difference with respect to the connection weights. Back-propagation networks (BPNN) are created by generalizing the Widrow-Hoff learning rule to multiple-layer networks and nonlinear differentiable transfer functions. As shown in gure 4, these networks are multi-layer networks with hidden layers of sigmoid transfer function and a linear output layer. From the gure we can see that i and b1 are weighted factors and biases for hidden layer and LW2,1 and b2 are weighted factors and biases for output layer, and n1 and n2 are inputs of transformation function for hidden layer and output layer. The biases are set at 1 for initialization. BPNN was used to monitor turbine engine performance and diagnose failures in real time (Kangas et al. 1994). Ross et al. (1997) applied BPNN to minimize the amount of data required to completely dene the aerodynamic performance of a wind tunnel model. BPNNs were employed for rapid and efcient dynamics and control analysis of exible systems (Sparks and Maghami 1998). The NN-enhanced RSM trains the NN by employing the original data set. The trained network is then used to generate additional data to augment the original information available to characterize the design space. The least-squares principle can be applied to the NN-enhanced RSM, the least-square recipe is minimizing the sum-squared error. Radial basis function NNs consist of neurons that are locally tuned. A radial basis function network can be regarded as a feed-forward NN with a single layer of hidden units, whose responses are the outputs of radial basis functions. The input of each radial basis function of a radial basis function NN is the distance between the input vector (activation) and its centre (location). A RBNN-enhanced RSM was developed and applied to injector design and optimization for rocket propulsion (Shyy et al. 1999). In the current paper, a standard BPNN is used to augment the data. After the model adequacy analysis, the response surface can be obtained with enhanced data, then the procedures of the polynomial-based RSM are adopted. The neural network toolbox in Matlab is used in the current work. When using the NNenhanced RSM in xture planning, two main points are considered. One point is to normalize the data before training. The approach for scaling network inputs and targets is to normalize the mean and standard deviation of the training set. This procedure is implemented in the function prestd of Matlab software. It normalizes the inputs and targets so that they will have zero mean and unity standard deviation. After the network has been trained, the outputs need to be converted back into the same units that were used for the original targets; the vectors containing the mean and standard deviations of the original inputs and original targets should be used to transform any future inputs that are applied to the network. They effectively become a part of the network, just like the network weights and biases.

Figure 4. Block diagram of a BPNN.

Quality design of xture planning

The second point is to improve the generalization using the method of early stopping. In this technique, the available data are divided into three subsets: training, validation, and test sets. The rst subset is the training set, which is used for computing the gradient and updating the network weights and biases. The second subset is the validation set. The error on the validation set is monitored during the training process. The validation error will normally decrease during the initial phase of training, as does the training set error. However, when the network begins to overt the data, the error on the validation set will typically begin to rise. The performance of the selected network should be conrmed by measuring its performance on a third independent set of data called a test set. The training is stopped when the validation error increases for a specied number of iterations, and the weights and biases at the minimum of the validation error are returned. A linear regression between the network outputs and the corresponding targets can be performed to analyse the network response.

4. 4.1

Comparison and discussion of quality design methods Modelling of car door assembly

As one of the typical automotive body assemblies, the door assembly is used as an industrial case study of this paper. The illustrative diagram and nite element model for the door assembly are shown in gures 2 and 3; the initial xturing layout is shown with black squares in gure 2. Three one-way pins are used in the assembly instead of the 21 pins, the coordinates of the locating pins are (72,433,0), (472,433,0) and (0, 175,0). The element type in ANSYS software is SHELL63, and the thicknesses for the upper and lower panels are 1.5 mm and 2.0 mm. The material of the two panels is mild steel with Youngs modulus E = 207 000 N/mm2 and Possions ratio = 0.3. The mesh size is set at 25 mm. The designed locators will move around the edges of the panels. Similar to the simple example, the welds are modelled with the spot weld feature of ANSYS software. 4.2 Quality design with the non-linear programming model As an optimal approach, that only needs performance information, the GA is used in the quality design model. In GA the number of populations is set at 20, the crossover probability is 0.85, and the mutation probability is 0.05. The convergence criterion is that the difference of objective function for the best xturing scheme in every 30 generations should be satised with || < 103 . The weighting factor of the optimal model as shown in equation (2) is set at 0.75. The initial scheme comes from the local automotive workshop. The process of quality design with GA is shown in gure 5. From the gure we can see that after 30 generations of evolution the objective function is approaching stable. The quality design results are presented in table 1. From the results we can see that both mean value and variance are obviously reduced, which indicates that the optimal xturing scheme with quality design is better than the practically used initial xturing scheme. 4.3 Quality design with polynomial response surface methodology As a 421 locating scheme is used for door assembly, the number of designed locators is eight. In the design of the experiment, eight design variables representing eight designed locators are set with three levels: the nominal location, the backward-disturbed location, and the forward-disturbed location. Each location has an x coordinate and a y coordinate; the

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Figure 5. Optimal process of quality design with the GA.

Table 1. Quality design results for the door assembly with the nonlinear programming NP model (weighting factor = 0.75). Coordinates of eight designed locators (mm) Initial locating scheme Quality design results (50,0,0), (225,0,0), (600,99.5,0), (193,750,0), (121.5,750,0), (405.6,734.5,0), (0,550,0), (0,450,0) (75,0,0), (250,0,0), (600,322.2,0), (97.7,750,0), (516.6,575.0,0), (240.7,750,0), (0,350,0), (0,525,0) Mean value (mm) 358.74 238.32 Variance (mm) 9.5625 1.4152

physical variables cannot be directly applied in the response surface model. In the current paper, the distances between the origin and the design locations are used as coded variables: the three levels are labelled +1, 0 and 1. Here, the optimal scheme from the non-linear programming quality design model is used as nominal scheme, which corresponds to level 0 in the polynomial RSM model. A 3k fractional factorial design of the BBD is used. The analysis of variance for the tted response surface model is presented in table 2. The test on individual
Table 2. Analysis of variance for the polynomial response surface model. Source of variance Sum of squares Degrees of freedom 45 72 67 5 117

Mean square 8.49 0.11037 0.098456 0.27006

F0 76.9231 0.3646

F-Value F0.05,45.72 1.59 F0.05,67.5 2.35 R 2 = 0.97962 2 Radj = 0.96734

Regression 382.05 Residual 7.9468 Lack of t 6.5965 Pure error 1.3503 Total 389.99 Coef. of Multiple determination Adjusted R 2

Quality design of xture planning

Figure 6. Fitted response surface for locators x1, x2, x4 and x5. Table 3. Quality design results with polynomial RSM and NN-enhanced RSM. Coordinates of eight designed locators (mm) Polynomial RSM NN-enhanced RSM (100,0,0), (275,0,0), (600,346.989,0), (121.5,750,0), (517.4,573.9,0), (264.52,750,0), (0,375,0), (0,550,0) (100,0,0), (275,0,0), (600,346.989,0), (73.8,750,0), (514.8,577.8,0), (216.85,750,0), (0,375,0), (0,500,0) Mean value (mm) 232.059 229.151

regression coefcients of the full-term second-order response surface model is then carried out. By using t-tests on individual regression coefcients with a 0.95 condence interval, only some of the terms are signicant to the tted model. With the deletion of the less-effective terms, the meaningful response surface model can be obtained as follows: y = 239.92 + 0.23955 x1 0.52822 x2 + 0.13022 x3 + 0.76706 x4 + 0, 32657 x5 + 1.2343 x6 + 1.0888 x7 + 1.2089 x8 0.43449 x2 x3 1.0404 x3 x5 0.75465 x5 x6 0.95384 x7 x8 0.79272 x1 x1 0.36359 x2 x2 + 0.31024 x4 x4 + 2.7326 x5 x5 0.77905 x6 x6 + 0.24978 x7 x7 0.63939 x8 x8 The tted response surfaces for locators x1, x2, x4 and x5 are shown in gure 6. The quality design results with polynomial RSM are presented in table 3. 4.4 Quality design with neural network-enhanced response surface methodology The BPNN is rst modelled with 23 neurons in the hidden layer; as the output of xture planning in this paper refers to the root-square variation of the sheet metals, the output layer only includes one neuron. The transformation functions of hidden and output layers used are the tansig function and linear function in Matlab. The 118 experimental data items obtained from the BBD in section 4.3 are divided into three subsets: training set, validity set, and test set. The proportion of the used data for the three subsets is 2:1:1. The squared errors of the NN training process are shown in gure 7, and the linear regression diagram between network

(5)

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Figure 7. Squared errors for training, validation and testing of the NN training progress.

outputs and targets is shown in gure 8. The training stopped after eight iterations because the validation error is increased. It is a useful diagnostic tool to plot the training, validation and test errors to check the progress of training. The result as shown in the gure is reasonable, since the test set error and the validation set error have similar characteristics, and it does not appear that any signicant over-tting has occurred. The analysis of network response is performed, the entire data set is put through the network (training, validation and test), and a linear regression between the network outputs and the corresponding targets is performed. The linear relationship is obtained as shown in equation (6). A = 0.895T + 25.3 (6)

where A refers to the network outputs and T refers to the targets. The outputs seem to track the targets reasonably well, and the correlation coefcient R value is 0.957 (R = 1 means

Figure 8. Linear regression diagram between network outputs and targets.

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11

Figure 9. Comparison of variation performance with different quality design methods.

perfect correlation). After the network response analysis we know that the data obtained from the NN are reasonable for later response surface modelling. Using a uniform distribution in domain [1,1] the additional data are generated with the NN. Together with original data obtained from the BBD, a new response surface is tted using the least-square approximation. The quality design results with NN-enhanced RSM are presented in table 3. The initial locating scheme of the door assembly in this article is taken from an industrial workshop. A comparison of performance of root-squared variation corresponding to optimal xturing schemes with three quality design methods is shown in gure 9. It can be seen from the gure that the variation performance of the optimal scheme obtained by the non-linear programming model can be reduced by 33.6% compared with the initial xturing scheme, while the variation performance obtained by the polynomial RSM can improve 2.6% compared with that of the non-linear programming model. As shown in gure 9 and table 3, the xturing scheme obtained by NN-enhanced RSM can be treated as a ne model tuned to the polynomial RSM and about 1.25% of the variation performance can be improved.

5.

Summary

It is very important to carry out quality design of xture planning for sheet metal assembly in order to improve the quality of the body-in-white assembly process. Three different quality design methods are presented in this paper; based on the industrial case study of a door assembly, a comparison and discussion of xturing design with the presented design methods are carried out. By inputting the variance item into the variation performance-based objective function, a synthesized robust objective function is formulated for optimal design with the non-linear programming model. By quality design with this model, the variation performance can be improved drastically. This model can be used to screen the robust design space for xture planning.

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The design of experiment approach is useful in selecting the data needed in the optimization task. A second-order response surface model is tted by a 3k fractional factorial design. Through analysis of the variance of the experimental data, a tted response model is nally obtained. Based on this polynomial RSM model the robust locating scheme can be obtained. By inspecting the inuence of each design variable, one can also gain insight into the existence of multiple design choices and select the optimum design based on more factors. NNs are powerful tools for approximation, but it is important to optimize the design parameters during the training process to obtain good prediction accuracy. It has been demonstrated that the NN can be used to condently generate additional design points. Additional design points generated by the BPNN are added to the original data set to form the enhanced data set. The NN-enhanced RSM can help to improve the accuracy. Comparison of the enhanced response surfaces with the original response surfaces indicates that the extra data produced with the BPNN generally improve the quality of the curve tted. The robust xturing design schemes obtained in this paper are less sensitive to the location uncertainty of the designed locators, which is very important in application to improve the assembly quality. Moreover, the comparative study of quality design methods shows that the non-linear programming model can be used for the determination of a robust design space, the polynomial RSM can be modelled in the robust design space obtained from the non-linear programming model, it can be used to adjust the function characteristic locally, while NNenhanced RSM can be used to ne tune the response surface. These quality design methods in this work are feasible to deal with the type of engineering problem in which an explicit relation between variables and performance is difcult to obtain.

Acknowledgements This project is partly supported by Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 50505010) and is also supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong (No. 04300845).

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