An Assembly Structure using Functional Element for Product Assembly Sequence Generation

Themanagement of design information is been becoming more and more important, and considerable research is being carried out on the representation of design information of assembly parts. This paper describes the representation of an assembly structure, which includes the introduction of a functional element. By using this functional element, constraint of the assembly structure can be naturally described. The functional element is used to express relations among the parts, and a relation can describe constraints among assembly parts which interfere without touching. The relation includes an assembly method and is capable of describing both constraint and interference. We demonstrate that our representation of the assembly structure reduces the search space of the assembly sequence.