Abstract
Tolerancing decisions during the design of electromechanical products profoundly affect cost and quality. Existing approaches to tolerance analysis and synthesis entail detailed knowledge of geometry of the assemblies and are mostly applicable during advanced stages of design, leading to a less than optimal design process. Motivated by this, we identify and explore two goals of research that we believe can expand the scope of tolerancing to the entire design process. The first goal is to advance tolerancing decisions to the earliest possible stages of design. This issue raises the need for effective representation of tolerancing information during early stages of design and for effective assembly modeling. The second goal addresses the appropriate use of industry best practices and efficient computational approaches for tolerance analysis and synthesis. The objective then is to focus on successive stages of design and use tolerance representations at the appropriate level of abstraction and match them with appropriate computational approaches, culminating in an ideal design process from a tolerancing perspective.