Information Modeling to Manage Tolerances during Product and Process Design

For car and aircraft industries, the management of tolerances has become an important issue in product and process design. Indeed, designers need to manage the tolerances and to know information that contributed to their determination. To do so, we propose to integrate a qualitative and a quantitative aspect of tolerancing. This quantitative aspect is based on the Key Characteristics approach, the mathematical models of tolerance, and the mathematical tools for tolerance analysis and tolerance synthesis. Our approach uses graphic conventions of UML to represent the information model. A prototype has been realized using an Object Oriented Data Base.