Computer aided assembly planning generation: An approach method of based constraint

Assembly Planning is an important part of product design. However, the development of computer aided assembly planning (CAAP) lags behind that of computer aided process planning (CAPP). There are two important reasons for such situation: 1) in most advanced industries, the level of assembly automation is lower than the level of process automation and 2) the CAAP is a complicated task. It involves identification of all possible assembly sequences for the product followed by the selection of "the best" (optimal) one. In this paper, authors present a method that uses constraints to generate the assembly planning. The complexity of finding the optimal assembly sequence is thus reduced. The method is illustrated by practical examples.