Assembly Features Utilization to Support Production System Adaptation

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a proposed methodology to extend the evolvable assembly system (EAS) paradigm for product design by utilizing assembly features in a product. In this paper, assembly features are used to bridge the gap between product design and assembly process by matching features of a part in an assembly to operations of a process in the EAS ontology. This can be achieved by defining and extracting a new set of assembly features called process features, which are features significant to specific and well-defined assembly operations. The extracted assembly features are represented in a proposed model based on product topology. A case-study example is conducted to illustrate the new methodology. A process-feature ontology is proposed as well in order to match the assembly requirements represented by process features with the available processes and skills in the EAS ontology so that adaptation of the production system can be achieved.