An optimal method of posture adjustment in aircraft fuselage joining assembly with engineering constraints

Posture of an aircraft fuselage can be evaluated based on the coordinate values of measure points fixed on the aircraft fuselage in aircraft final assembly. Posture adjustment is carried out by rotation and translation of the aircraft fuselage to make sure that the actual coordinate values of the measure points are coincided with the theoretical ones read from the computer aided design (CAD) model. The point registration method of posture adjustment without considering engineering constraints may cause out-of-tolerance for some engineering constraints. Hence, engineering constraints such as plane symmetry of two points, as well as coplanar and collinear of the multipoint should be considered in the new optimal method of posture adjustment in aircraft fuselage joining assembly. Based on the point registration model, a multi-objective optimization model of posture adjustment considering engineering constraints including collinear, coplanar, and symmetry constraints is established and represented by a uniform vector function. The weights of constraint conditions can be set freely in the optimization model to reflect the importance of the corresponding constraints in aircraft fuselage joining assembly. The rotation and translation parameters of posture adjustment are obtained by the proposed multi-objective optimization algorithm based on the Gauss-Newton method. Results of an example of aircraft fuselage joining assembly show that constraint errors of posture adjustment obtained by the multi-objective optimization model are not out of tolerance for design constraint errors and satisfy the requirement of aircraft fuselage joining assembly. (C) 2017 Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. on behalf of Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics.