......................................................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................................... ii Table of Figures .......................................................................

Modular fixtures are gaining wide use for flexible manufacturing and job shop machining. A modular fixture is an arrangement of fixture elements (fixels) that will locate and securely hold a given part. Typically, a human combines intuition with trial-and-error to design fixtures. In some cases designers are unable to design a fixture with given fixels and must resort to custom tooling. It is p...

The term xturing refers to the task of immobilizing a workpiece for the purpose of performing operations such as assembly and machining. As such, xturing is of fundamental importance to industrial manufacturing. Fixtures can either be fabricated from scratch, or assembled from a toolkit of modular components, the latter approach is termed modular xturing. In this paper, we present a complete al...

This paper considers the problem of evaluating and benchmarking process design configuration in a multi-station assembly process. We focus on the unique challenges brought by the multi-station system, namely, (1) a system level model to characterize the variation propagation in the entire process, and (2) the necessity to describe the system response to variation inputs at both global (system l...

Reconfigurable assembly systems enable a family of products to be assembled in a single system by adjusting and reconfiguring fixtures according to each product. The sharing of fixtures among different products impacts their robustness to fixture variation due to trade offs in fixture design (to allow the accommodation of the family in the single system) and to frequent reconfigurations. This p...