Automated assembly planning based on skeleton modelling strategy

Abstract

Because of intensification of the international market situation the industry is forced to extend the product range and to shorten the period of time between the model changes in order to put new products on the market. Standards that allow generating product and resource variants by creating reusable structures (templates) have to be worked out to support the simultaneous engineering process. The challenge is the parallelisation of the product development and the production planning as far as possible to generate a robust production. In process planning as a part of assembly planning, the assembly processes and their sequence have to be defined and the motion path and speed of an assembly process can be visualized and optimized by Digital Mock-Up (DMU). Realising an early connection between product design and assembly planning new strategies have to be developed. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.