Selective disassembly: representation and comparative analysis of wave propagation abstractions in sequence planning

This paper analyses the problem of removing one or more components of an assembly, defined as selective disassembly, and presents geometric abstractions and representations for automated selective disassembly analysis of geometric models. Based on the number of target components to be disassembled from an assembly (A) of n components, the selective disassembly (SD) problem is categorized into three classes: 1) single component disassembly (1-SD); 2) disassembling s(1<s≪n) components from A (defined as s-SD); and 3) disassembling S (S→n) components from A (defined as S-SD). Some preliminary results of a prototype system, assembly-disassembly in three dimensions, implementing the SD abstractions, and analysis of the abstractions for different classes of SD problems, are presented