The ICE assembly sequence planner

An integrated concurrent engineering (ICE) system is under development which will allow a designer access to assembly, production, and other manufacturing information while a design is being developed, thus ensuring a better product. In addition, the ICE system will automatically generate assembly and robotic task plans and the robot code needed to assemble the product when the design is completed. An automated assembly sequence planner (ASP), a part of the ICE automated assembly design and planning component, has been developed. The ASP takes as input the relationship structure of a product. generates all the physically feasible assembly sequences using a context-free grammar, meta rules, and heuristics, and selects an optimum assembly sequence plan based on user-defined criteria. Compared with human engineers, the ASP can explore alternative assembly sequences more thoroughly, determine the optimum plan more quickly, and produce plans more consistently