• 대한산업공학회지
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• 제29권1호
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• pp.49-64
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• 2003

Although assembly sequence planning is an essential task in assembly process planning, it is known as one of the most difficult and time consuming jobs because its complexity is increased geometrically when the number of parts in an assembly is increased. The purpose of this study is to develop a more efficient algorithm for generating assembly sequences automatically. By considering subassemblies, a new heuristic method generates a preferred parallel assembly sequence that can be used in robotic assembly systems. A parallel assembly sequence concept provides a new representation scheme for an assembly in which the assembly sequence precedence information is not required. After an user inputs both the directional mating relation information and the mating condition information, an assembly product is divided into subgroups if the product has cut-vertices. Then, a virtual disassembly process is executed to generate alternate parallel assembly sequences with intermediate assembly stability. Through searching parts relations in the virtual disassembly process, stable subassemblies are extracted from translation-free parts along disassembling directions and this extraction continues until no more subassemblies are existed. Also, the arithmetic mean parallelism formula as a preference criterion is adapted to select the best parallel assembly sequence among others. Finally a preferred parallel assembly sequence is converted to an assembly BOM structure. The results from this study can be utilized for developing CAAPP(Computer-Aided Assembly Process Planning) systems as an efficient assembly sequence planning algorithm.