Research on uncertainty in measurement assisted alignment in aircraft assembly

Operations in assembling and joining large size aircraft components are changed to novel digital and flexible ways by digital measurement assisted alignment.Positions and orientations（P＆O）of aligned components are critical characters which assure geometrical positions and relationships of those components.Therefore,evaluating the P＆O of a component is considered necessary and critical for ensuring accuracy in aircraft assembly.Uncertainty of position and orientation（U-P＆O）,as a part of the evaluating result of P＆O,needs to be given for ensuring the integrity and credibility of the result;furthermore,U-P＆O is necessary for error tracing and quality evaluating of measurement assisted aircraft assembly.However,current research mainly focuses on the process integration of measurement with assembly,and usually ignores the uncertainty of measured result and its influence on quality evaluation.This paper focuses on the expression,analysis,and application of U-P＆O in measurement assisted alignment.The geometrical and algebraical connotations of U-P＆O are presented.Then,an analytical algorithm for evaluating the multi-dimensional U-P＆O is given,and the effect factors and characteristics of U-P＆O are discussed.Finally,U-P＆O is used to evaluate alignment in aircraft assembly for quality evaluating and improving.Cases are introduced with the methodology.

Risk management for sulfur dioxide abatement under multiple uncertainties

In this study, interval-parameter programming, two-stage stochastic progranaming （TSP）, and conditional value-at-risk （CVaR） were incorporated into a general optimization framework, leading to an interval-parameter CVaR-based two-stage programming （ICTP） method. The ICTP method had several advantages： （i） its objective function simultaneously took expected cost and risk cost into consideration, and also used discrete random variables and discrete intervals to reflect uncertain properties; （ii） it quantitatively evaluated the right tail of distributions of random variables which could better calculate the risk of violated environmental standards; （iii） it was useful for helping decision makers to analyze the trade-offs between cost and risk; and （iv） it was effective to penalize the second-stage costs, as well as to capture the notion of risk in stochastic programming. The developed model was applied to sulfur dioxide abatement in an air quality management system. The results indicated that the ICTP method could be used for generating a series of air quality management schemes under different risk-aversion levels, for identifying desired air quality management strategies for decision makers, and for considering a proper balance between system economy and environmental quality.