Entropic evaluation of assemblability in concurrent approach to assembly planning

This paper describes a comprehensive method for automation of assembly planning. It reports on the developments made by the authors in assembly modeling and assembly sequence planning. Then an evolutionary and interactive assembly planning (EIAP) method is described where the potential of the virtual environment as a user interface to evaluate the assembly sequence is investigated. Finally, to avoid biased or unrepresentative inputs, this paper introduces a unique evaluation for assemblability of the product based on information entropy. This paper concludes by exploiting the interesting feature of this newly introduced measure for assemblability that it can be used for disassemblability measurement in the same approach