KBAP: an industrial prototype of knowledge-based assembly planner

Delchambre (1990, 1991) and Delchambre and A. Wafflard (1991) presented an automatic and user-friendly approach to computer-aided assembly planning. The authors give a brief summary of the assembly planner´s specifications and of the methodology used to generate the assembly. Industrial case studies are presented to illustrate the various stages of the assembly sequence generation. User-friendly formalisms to represent the intermediate and final results to the user are outlined. The proposed approach is user-friendly because the intermediate and final results presented were easily understandable by the user despite the combinatorial explosion of results. The industrial prototype of the assembly planner and the user interaction with the system are discussed. Several results obtained with this prototype are presented and discussed on the basis of the industrial case studies