Automatic Subassembly Detection from a Product Model for Disassembly Sequence Generation

The time taken for the generation of assembly or disassembly sequences is proportional to the number of components in the assembled product. For each additional component considered, the number of possible sequences to assemble (or disassemble the product) increases combinatorially. Research work had been carried out to reduce this complexity so that unfeasible assembly sequences could be discounted. A significant approach to further reduce the time for the generation of the assembly sequences is to group components together into subassemblies and then to treat these subassemblies as "individual components". This will reduce the number of components involved in the search or generation of assembly sequences, and hence reducing the sequence generation time. This paper presents a methodology for automatically extracting subassemblies from a product in order to simplify the disassembly or assembly sequence generation.