Comparative assembly planning during assembly design

Strides toward concurrent engineering have called for a need for integrating design with assembly planning. That is, a true concurrent engineering platform must be able to, for example, perform preliminary assembly planning during conceptual design stages so that alternative assembly plans can be evaluated and compared for redesign or refining a design with a promising candidate assembly plan. This paper presents such an integrated system of an assembly planner and a (re)designer, in which, results from comparative analysis of preliminary candidate assembly plans are used to (re)design further details of a given assembly. The integration results in a more effective way of doing assembly planning and “design-for-assembly”. A redesign process of a simple switch box is demonstrated to illustrate the benefits