A multi-plant tolerance allocation model for assembled electronic products

To produce an assembled electronic product, the components are manufactured with certain manufacturing operations and then assembled with the required assembly operations. In the manufacturing operations, each component must be manufactured within the allocated working tolerances such that the assembly operations can be performed to build the final product. In a collaborative manufacturing system, the components are assigned to the available manufacturing operations with different tolerance and cost characteristics at different plants. In this research, a multi-plant tolerance allocation model for assembled electronic products is presented. Firstly, given the blueprint dimensions and tolerances of a product, a tolerance allocation model is presented to determine the working tolerance of each of the components to maximize the cumulative sum of the working tolerances. Finally, a mathematical programming model is presented to assign the components to the suitable plants with minimized multi-plant manufacturing costs. An example product is tested and illustrated.