Therefore, to improve the manufacturer’s assembly plan definition, an analysis of all feasible assembly sequences for a product could be useful. This analysis can help the manufacturer to choose an efficient assembly sequence able to allow the reduction of the overall assembly process costs by reducing the number of the fixture and tool changes or the number of the reorientations during assembly tasks. Unfortunately, this analysis could often result impracticable at industrial level because of the longer time required to generate all the feasible assembly sequences of the product.
Based on the previous works, the proposal aims to the definition of an approach to automatically extract, at least, a feasible assembly sequence for a product directly from its CAD model without human support, independently of the adopted modelling technique and considering a concept level of the model, evaluating in a hierarchical approach the importance of both sub-assemblies and components. This approach is useful to define assembly sequences in the early stages of designing in order to allow and to improve the application of design methodologies.
The study requires the development of a software application able to demonstrate the feasibility of the idea.