Micro planning for mechanical assembly operations

Significant advances have been made in the area of macro-planning for assembly operations (i.e.,, dividing a product into sub-assemblies, determining the sequence of assembly operations). On the contrary, the state of the art in micro-planning (i.e., tool selection, path planning for tool and part movements) is rather primitive. To generate a realizable assembly plan, both macro-planning and micro-planning problems need to be solved. Tooling considerations are an important component of the micro-planning problem. Therefore, we present a methodology for modeling assembly tools, selecting tools for assembly operations, and generating detailed tool movements. Techniques described in this paper can be combined with macro-planning techniques to result in a complete assembly planner