Task Planning for Top-down Collaborative Assembly Design

The top-down collaborative assembly design process of a product is highly concurrent. Rational task planning significantly affects cycle and efficiency of the product design. This paper discusses the task planning for top-down collaborative assembly design which contains task grouping and task group assignment. A genetic algorithm for the task grouping is developed according to two principles: one is that the workload should be equilibrium among the design teams; the other is that the tasks with high coupling relationships should be grouped into the same task group. And the algorithm for task group assignment is presented according to criticality of the task group and comprehensive capability of the design team. As a case, top-down collaborative assembly design of the shaper is demonstrated