A hierarchical approach to assembly planning

This paper describes a fundamentally new approach to assembly sequence planning which views an assembly as a hierarchy of standard structures and uses a strategy of merging partial plans for structures to derive a plan for the whole assembly. Such a planner has been implemented on a Sun Sparc Station 1. It generates a plan in which there are no subassemblies, if such a plan exists, given as a partial order in terms of the sequence of part insertion and their trajectories. The planning algorithm is shown to be correct and complete and the methodology is shown to lessen considerably the combinatorial problems encountered by current planners working on large real world problems