Optimal assembly sequence generation of products from CAD

Abstract

newline Today s manufacturing companies have to equip their facilities effectively to face global competition. Outperforming competitors requires every manufacturing company to reduce the manufacturing cost and lead time of their products by implementing new technologies. Manufacturing operations can be classified as process operation and assembly operation. The shape, property and appearance of a part are enhanced in process operation whereas two or more parts are joined to form a new product in an assembly operation. A mechanical assembly is a stable unit consisting of more than one part. Removing a part or more than one part from the assembly is called as disassembly process. The sequence in which parts are joined to form an assembly can be identified by backward approach and forward approach. Reversing the sequence in which the parts are disassembled from the assembly is called backward approach. In the forward approach, the parts to be assembled are identified directly. Generally, assembly is achieved by joining the parts in different sequences. Lead time and cost are not same for all assembly sequences and hence a systematic method is required to identify the best assembly sequence. This research work presents a novel methodology to find optimal assembly sequence generation of mechanical product. It is necessary to model the product in a compact and comprehensible fashion, since the parts are positioned in the assembly on the basis of the application. As many researchers have widely used graph based methodology for representing the product to be assembled, the same had been used in this work for identifying the part assembly sequence. The precedence or connection relations between the parts in the assembly are widely used by newlineprevious researchers for generating disassembly sequences. newline