Evaluation and Search of Assembly Sequences in Large Systems

In order to build a comprehensive automated assembly planning tool, three important tasks must be accomplished: generating feasible assembly sequences, evaluating the quality of a sequence, and the search method for finding the optimal plan. This paper describes a novel approach to the latter two. The evaluation approach combines empirical data and geometric reasoning techniques to arrive at estimates of assembly time for any generic assembly model. The evaluation is constantly invoked from a tree-search method that only searches amongst valid assembly operations. The algorithm has been tested on a variety of examples ranging from simple to complex assemblies.Copyright © 2013 by ASME