Composite materials have been widely applied to aircraft structures due to their significant mechanical performance and lightweight. However， the shape difference， which induced by curing deformation， between the actual and theoretical composite panels leads to poor assembly accuracy. This paper proposes a shape control method with flexible tooling based on the finite element analysis and the adaptive genetic algorithm. The optimized displacement of every distributed shape adjusting end can be calculated to meet the requirements for shape conformity and structural healthy of the composite panel. The feasibility of the method has been verified via the shape optimization of aircraft wing-body fairing composite panel. Experimental results indicate that the shape conformity （within 0.3 mm） increases from 66.46% to 86.36% with the proposed optimized method. Moreover， the accuracy and efficiency for the composite panel assembly have been significantly improved. This study provides a new efficient and accuracy approach for the shape adjustment of composite panels during the assembly process.
Wang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.