Optimal Mating of Precision Components in Manufacturing

In the January 2021 issue of Operations Research Letters, Prof. Weber presents a new method for robustly matching random parts with the smallest possible error. The method is useful for selective assembly systems typically employed in high-precision assembly such as in the watch and automotive industries, where the input tolerances often exceed the allowable output tolerances. For example, when assembling a simple electrical oscillator, its resonance frequency depends on the characteristics of the capacitor and inductivity in the circuit, both of which may be subject to uncontrollable variations. To still achieve a low-tolerance resonance frequency, it is possible to group the constituent parts into multiple bins, each with smaller variations, to then match the parts among corresponding high-precision matching classes. Prof. Weber’s results provide a solution for how to bin the assembly parts optimally, minimizing the maximum absolute deviation from a given criterion (such as the resonance frequency of the electrical oscillator in our example).