VSA RECEIVES NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION GRANT TO DEVELOP TOLERANCE
OPTIMIZATION SYSTEM

(St. Clair Shores, Michigan -- March 3, 1995) Variation Systems Analysis,
Inc. (VSA) today announced that it has received a $300,000 grant from the
National Science Foundation to research and develop software to
automatically optimize tolerance allocation for minimum cost and maximum
quality. The approach couples a genetic optimization algorithm with VSA's
Monte Carlo tolerance analysis software.

The interaction among the various tolerances with respect to functional
considerations and the size and complexity of the design space makes it a
difficult challenge to specify acceptable tolerance levels by hand.
Optimization, choosing the lowest cost and most robust tolerance levels
from the huge number of potentially acceptable designs, is so difficult
that only limited improvements can be made with a manual approach. Yet the
ability to allocate tolerances in an optimal manner has the potential to
dramatically reduce costs and increase product quality.

Commercial tolerance optimization has never been accomplished before,
primarily because the algorithms currently used for optimization are not
robust enough to handle the complexity of the problem. For this reason,
VSA has taken a non-traditional approach involving genetic optimization
which is based on the paradigm of natural selection. A population of
designs is produced, ranked from best to worst on various criteria and
allowed to "mate" with each other to produce new designs. This process is
repeated many times resulting in a constantly improving population of
designs.

VSA received a $50,000 Phase I NSF grant two years ago to perform a
feasibility study on this approach. Phase I research concentrated on
developing the basic code and testing it with ten problems taken from a
variety of sources including published examples and real world
applications. The performance of the algorithm on the test set
demonstrated both the feasibility of the approach and the potential value
of the tool. In all cases, a viable solution was achieved. For the
problems taken from published sources, better solutions were generated
than had previously been reported.

With Phase I successfully completed, the most recent award will fund a
two-year development process. The focus of the Phase II research effort
will include both improvements to the performance of the various
algorithmic components and extend the problem to include nominal
dimensions. "Successful completion of this project will introduce a
paradigm shift to the dimensional management community. The designer or
engineer will set the functional specification of the design and this tool
will optimally assign the tolerances," says Mark Iannuzzi, Project
Principal Investigator and Vice President, Software Development.

Variation Systems Analysis Inc
300 Maple Park Blvd
St. Clair Shores, MI 48081
810-774-2640,  fax 810-778-6470

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