Assembly Sequence Planning

Assembly plays a fundamental role in the manufacturing of most products. Parts that have been individually formed or machined to meet designed specifications are assembled into a configuration that achieves the functions of the final product or mechanism. The economic importance of assembly as a manufacturing process has led to extensive efforts to improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of assembly operations. The sequence of mating operations that can be carried out to assemble a group of parts is constrained by the geometric and mechanical properties of the parts, their assembled configuration, and the stability of the resulting subassemblies. An approach to representation and reasoning about these sequences is described here and leads to several alternative explicit and implicit plan representations.