Assembly sequences: planning and simulating assembly operations

Assembly covers all problems linked to making contact between a product\´s components. It is a costly manufacturing operation, which must be evaluated during the product design stage. Assembly sequences must be drawn up and validated as early as possible during the design process, so as to be taken into account when decisions are made as to the choice of design. To meet this requirement it is essential to develop tools for generating assembly sequences. The method proposed includes a stage of planning assembly operations, based on the "and/or graph" principle, followed by a stage involving simulation of these operations which is performed with Catia V5 CAD software. The principle used for planning is original because it is not based on geometrical connections between components, but on the structural relations between product components. This program may take into account complementary criteria (technical, contact, accessibility, gravity, tooling..). The automatic generation of assembly sequences can then be used to evaluate product assembly in terms of costs or difficulty, for example