S. Chakrabarty et J. Wolter, A STRUCTURE-ORIENTED APPROACH TO ASSEMBLY SEQUENCE PLANNING, IEEE transactions on robotics and automation, 13(1), 1997, pp. 14-29
An assembly sequence planner is a system which, given a description of
an assembly to be manufactured, identifies subassemblies and generate
s high-level plans for the construction of the each subassembly, inclu
ding the final assembly, Previous research has shown that feasible pla
ns can be efficiently produced for large assemblies, but the generatio
n of good plans has met with less success. Not only are there difficul
ties in defining ''good plans,'' but all published methods for finding
good plans have computational complexities that make them unlikely to
be practical for large assemblies, This paper shows that representing
an assembly as a hierarchy of assembly structures can overcome many o
f these difficulties. A planner is described which uses the structure
hierarchy both as a framework for structure-dependent definitions of a
good plan, and as a tool for finding good plans more rapidly by using
high-level expert advice, by reusing subplans for repeated substructu
res, and by not fully optimizing the plan, Analytical and experimental
results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approac
h.