Assembly Sequence Planning based on Graduated NonConvexity and Concavity Procedure

Assembly Sequence Planning (ASP) is a NP-hard combinatorial problem. In order to reduce computational complexity, this paper proposes a novel assembly sequence planning approach based on Graduated NonConvexity and Concavity Procedure (GNCPP), a general optimization framework which approximately solve the combinatorial optimization problems defined on the set of partial permutation matrices. The mathematical model of ASP is transformed to matrix form and the gradient of the objective function is deduced to meet the requirement of GNCCP. In addition, an efficient searching algorithm is proposed for GNCCP. The comparison experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.