Clamping and welding sequence optimisation for minimising cycle time and assembly deformation

Elastic Assembly Variation Simulation (EAVS) is a computer program to simulate the dimensional variations of manufacturing process in vehicle body assembly. Welding and clamping are two major operations in the assembly process. The selection of the welding/clamping sequence in the original EAVS is based on minimising the assembly deformation. Cycle time was not considered as a criterion for sequence selection. This paper presents an extension of the original genetic algorithm in EAVS to include cycle time as part of the objective function. Application results show that the new algorithm can effectively minimise deformation and cycle time simultaneously.