Assembly Sequence Planning in VM System

Virtual manufacturing (VM) has been proved in different industrial contexts as an effective technology to ensure competitivity and increase profit margins. This paper presents such a system named MEWS, short for module-based extensible integrated VM system. The system now contains 7 modules and owns good extensibility. One of the most important modules is assembling module. It has significant impact on the performance of the system. The adoption of hierarchical assembly model with discrete patches brings many benefits for the whole system as well as the assembling module itself. And the hybrid assembly sequence planning based on subassembly identification with human-interaction expands the planner´s scope of application and enhances its robustness, while restricts human-interaction in hierarchical layers of the assembly model.