Minimizing user queries in interactive assembly planning

This paper describes an interactive computer-aided assembly planning system that greatly reduces the human input required to construct assembly plans. The system takes a dual approach. First, most assembly operations are validated automatically from the CAD models of the assembly´s parts using simple, fast techniques. Second, with each query the user is allowed to identify a set of parts that constrain a subassembly; the system uses this information to answer future queries automatically. This dual approach has proven quite powerful in experiments on real assemblies, reducing the number of queries by orders of magnitude over previous systems without sacrificing accuracy