Knowledge-based system for assembly process-planning

The paper discusses the feasibility of coupling AI (artificial intelligence) with an object-oriented database in the CAD/CAM environment. The products or parts are designed with the parametric and feature-based solid modeling Pro/Engineer. The authors go beyond data structures to integrate information about the assembly knowledge base. They design an object-oriented database called SISDES for modeling the data along with handling logic based reasoning of graph representation. The output is a knowledge-based system which integrates automated feature-recognition plus position and orientation needed for part mating. In this context, they define the possibility of contact and relative mobility for each pair of components. This latter becomes part of an AI module called XGEN (Assembly Sequences Generation) developed for knowledge processing and generating assembly sequence, i.e. the CAM activities