Collaborative decision of assembly sequence in distributed product development

Assembly related conflicts arising from collaborative product development process severely affect the downstream design and manufacturing activities. A collaborative approach to assembly sequence decision under distributed environment is presented. The product assembly is firstly decomposed into a hierarchical structure tree using an assembly representation based on connectors. The substructures are assigned to different team planners who will generate the sub assembly sequences by various assembly sequence planning systems. By combining these sequences systematically in a bottom-up manner and choosing suitable ones, the assembly sequence of each upper structure including the whole assembly in the structure tree are generated. Using a Web-based system, geographically dispersed team members can perform a 3D assembling visualization of products synchronously and the collaborative assembly sequence decisions are realized in distributed environment. Some prototype systems had been completed and a case was given to illustrate the method.