Design and inspection of multi-fixturing pallets for mixed part types

Over the last decades, manufacturing market has been characterized by small batch size, high variability in the part types and part type demand, continuous evolution of the products. In order to quickly answer the new and changing production requirements, the rapid redesign of the pallet in terms of number of parts and part types and the verification of physical mounted pallet became essential. Thus, this paper aims at (i) developing a dynamic process planning approach automatically providing multi-part pallet designs and (ii) identifying flexible techniques for the inspection of the physical pallet before its machining. Specifically, the approach analyzes the solution space generated by all the possible combination of part type setups in terms of number and position on the pallet. The number of produced part types per pallet is maximized, while the setup accessibility and an equal number of part types for each setup are granted. The 3D design of the pallet is compared with the scanned pallet cloud of points in order to identify possible error sources, e.g. part missing, incorrectly closed fixture, part type in wrong position. A test case will be provided in order to show the advantages deriving from the approach employment.