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Assembly Coplanner: co-operative assembly planner based on subassembly extraction

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The distribution of assembly workstations enables assembly operations to be done in parallel, while the multiple routing of parts in flexible assembly systems allows the opportunistic scheduling of assembly operations. This paper presents an assembly planning system, called the Assembly Coplanner, which automatically constructs an assembly partial order and generates a set of assembly instructions from a liaison graph representation of an assembly based on the extraction of preferred subassemblies. Assembly planning in Coplanner is carried out by the co-operation of multiple planning agents, such as the geometric reasoner, the physical reasoner, the resource manager and the plan coordinator, under the constraints of finding a cost-effective assembly plan in a flexible assembly system. The Coplanner identifies spatial parallelism in assembly as a means of constructing temporal parallelism among assembly operations. This is achieved in the following way: (1) the selection of a set of tentative subassemblies by decomposing a liaison graph into a set of subgraphs based on feasibility and difficulty of disassembly; (2) the evaluation of each of the tentative subassemblies in terms of assembly cost represented by subassembly selection indices; and (3) the construction of a hierarchical partial order graph (HPOG) as an assembly plan. A case study applying the Coplanner to a mechanical assembly is illustrated in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 91109, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Sukhan Lee

  2. Department of EE-Systems, University of Southern California, 90089-0273, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Sukhan Lee & Yeong Gil Shin

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  1. Sukhan Lee
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  2. Yeong Gil Shin
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Lee, S., Gil Shin, Y. Assembly Coplanner: co-operative assembly planner based on subassembly extraction. J Intell Manuf 4, 183–198 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00123963

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