A GEOMETRIC ALGORITHM FOR SINGLE SELECTIVE DISASSEMBLY USING THE WAVE-PROPAGATION ABSTRACTION

Disassembling a selected component from an assembly, defined as select ive disassembly, is important for applications such as maintenance, re cycling and reuse. This paper presents a geometric algorithm to solve the following selective disassembly problem: given an assembly and a s elected component to be disassembled, determine the disassembly sequen ce with minimum component removals (motions), defined as an optimum se quence. We propose an abstraction ''wave propagation'' that analyzes t he assembly from the selected component outwards, and orders the compo nents for selective disassembly. The main contributions of this resear ch are: (1) determining an optimal disassembly sequence; (2) reducing the search space by analyzing a subset of components in the assembly; and (3) providing a polynomial average complexity algorithm. The propo sed selective disassembly approach applies to both two dimensional and three-dimensional assemblies. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All righ ts reserved.