The riveting joint is one of the important joint methods to permanently fasten two thin-walled sheet-metal parts. It is most ba- sic to efficiently analyze and estimate the deformation of the riveting joint for the performance, fatigue durability and damage of the riveting structure in the aircraft. This paper researches the riveting process mathematics modeling and simulating to more accurately analyze deformation of thin-walled sheet-metal parts. First, the mathematics and mechanics models for the elastic deformation, plastic deformation and springback of the rivet are built by mechanics theory. Second, on the basis of ABAQUS system, a finite element system, an instance made up of the rivet and two thin-walled sheet-metal parts of aluminum alloy is used to analyze and simulate the stress and deformation. What＇s more, a comparison is made between the results obtained by the mathematics and mechanics models and those by finite element method （FEM）. The models are proved true by the calculating and simulation results of the instance.
There are numerous riveting points on the large-sized aircraft panel, irregular row of riveting points on delta wing. It is essential to plan the riveting sequence reasonably to improve the efficiency and accuracy of automatic drilling and riveting. Therefore, this article presents a new multi-objective optimization method based on ant colony optimization （ACO）. Multi-objective optimization model of automatic drilling and riveting sequence planning is built by expressing the efficiency and accuracy of riveting as functions of the points＇ coordinates. In order to search the sequences efficiently and improve the quality of the sequences, a new local pheromone updating rule is applied when the ants search sequences. Pareto dominance is incorporated into the proposed ACO to find out the non-dominated sequences. This method is tested on a hyperbolicity panel model of ARJ21 and the result shows its feasibility and superiority compared with particle swarm optimization （PSO） and genetic algorithm （GA）.
