Title: Assembly Sequence Generation with k-ary Operations

Sponsor: NSF, NIST-ATP

Collaborators:R. Kumar, J. Kong, Y. Zhou, S. Gogoneni (Dimensional Control Systems)

A k-ary assembly process is defined as a multi-station process with k={K_1, K_{2, ...,} K_{n, ...,} K_n}_, where k_n parts are assembled at station n. Generation of station sequences (or called subassembly selections in a k-ary process) and of joint sequences (or called mating feature sequences) are untapped research topics. The existing approaches in part sequence generation cannot be applied in station and joint sequence generation due to the following limitations: (I) the sequence generation is intractable due to the computational complexity of the algorithms; (II) they are incapable to deal with the situation when a k-ary process cannot be reduced to a binary process; (III) they are unable to generate a complete solution of joint sequences based on the generated binary part sequences.

This research overcomes the limitations by developing a methodology for sequence generation for a k-ary process. It is based upon proposed approaches of k-piece graph and k-piece mixed-graph which includes two steps: (1) k-piece graph and k-piece mixed-graph are defined to represent assemblies without and with available assembly precedence information, respectively; (2) generating all k-ary station sequences and joint sequences based on the generalized assembly representations