Effective component disassembly approach for aircraft assembly based on fuzzy-clustering algorithm

Engineering-Bill of Material (E-BOM) of aircraft comes from design, and is constructed by aircraft structure and function. It is difficult that E-BOM represents aircraft assembly process because an aircraft is assembled by thousands of parts and components. So it is very necessary that BOM is reconstructed by component disassembly for assembly process on the basis of E-BOM. In this paper, a component disassembly approach for aircraft assembly process based on fuzzy-clustering algorithm is presented. The approach includes two steps. Firstly, aircraft assembly tree of type hierarchy is used to represent the main structure of assembly by the matching method for the types of assembly objects. Some of parts include the main structure of assembly, but others are not included. Secondly, the fuzzy relationships between objects not included during the first step and its nearby objects are used to calculate fuzzy clusters in order to find the desired disassembling scheme, where component is evaluated by these targets: rigidity, difficulty of assembly manipulating and space between components. Finally, new BOM is got after all components are disassembled completely. We applied the approach successfully to component disassembling of certain central-wing of an aircraft.