Title: Optimisation of assembly plan through a three-stage integrated approach

Authors: Ruey-Shun Chen, Kung-Yung Lu, Pei-Hao Tai

Addresses: Institute of Information Management, National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan. Institute of Information Management, National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan. Logistics Bureau, CSF, Taipei, Taiwan

Abstract: Assembly planning is commonly a tedious design procedure requiring a significant amount of manpower to obtain a feasible work plan. Poor assembly planning not only results in higher product cost and lower productivity but may also negatively impact the reliability, maintainability, and availability of a product during its life cycle. This study proposes a three-stage integrated approach with some heuristic working rules to assist the planner to develop a feasible assembly plan. In the first stage, Above Graph and transforming rules are used to create a correct Explosion Graph of the assembly models. In the second stage, a three-level relational model is developed to create a complete relational model graph and an incidence matrix. In the third stage, a genetic algorithm approach is used to generate and evaluate a near-optimal assembly sequence. An example of a military system is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.

Keywords: assembly planning; design for assembly; DFA; genetic algorithm; multi-objective.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2004.003658

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2004 Vol.19 No.1, pp.28 - 38

Published online: 08 Oct 2003 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article