Systematic generation of assembly precedence graphs

In this paper, the authors present a complete method allowing a systematic generation of assembly precedence graphs for mechanical products. The generated precedence graphs can be used as the input data of different assembly line design methods such as line balancing. This method involves two stages: the first stage generates all feasible operations from which the second stage determines all the precedence graphs. The first stage is already operational, thus our attention is paid to the description of the principle of the second stage and its mathematical support. The basic idea of this stage is to decompose the set of all feasible operations into several subsets which determine all the precedence graphs. The mathematical support of this idea is a fundamental theorem whose proof is given. Some notions are introduced in this paper, like the assembly graph and base graph. The algorithm of this stage is proposed