1. Introduction: Assembly is considered as an important stage in the product lifecycle.

With the rapid development of manufacturing and information technology, industrial products are becoming more and more sophisticated; and the importance of the technology for product assemblies has been increasing. Data show that the time spent on assembling normally takes 20%50% of the total time of production, and the cost for assembly counts about 20%30% of the total cost of a particular product [1]. Assembly planning has a significant impact on the product delivery time, cost, quality, durability, as well as maintenance. Therefore, assembly planning is crucial to the success of a product, especially for complex products such as aircrafts, ships, automobiles, and aerospace products. This paper focuses on system architecture of software AutoAssem that is developed for automatic assembly planning and simulation.

2. Importance of Digital Assembly: Enterprise Systems (ES) has emerged as a promising tool used for integrating and coordinating digital manufacturing, and Industrial informatics continues to embrace cutting-edge ES technology and techniques for opening up new applications that impact industrial sectors [2].Digital Manufacturing is to use an integrated computer-based system comprised of analytics, simulation, three-dimensional (3D) visualization, and various collaboration tools to facilitate production, manufacturing, and assembly process[3]. The importance of the advanced digital manufacturing tools has been recognized globally. For example, China introduced computer integrated manufacturing tools as part of ES in early 1990s mean while computer-aided planning systems for managing enterprise manufacturing resources have been widely employed. The use of the CAD and CAM software tools for product design and manufacturing is de facto now.

Digital Assembly is a component of digital manufacturing for assembly purpose. In comparison with traditional methods, digital assembly can improve the efficiency of assembly planning, reduce the possibilities of failures, shorten delivery time, and reduce the assembly cost.

3. Problems with Existing software: CAD/CAM software tools for digital manufacturing can be generally classified into two categories based on the applications and complexities of modeling efforts. i) Tools for modeling of parts and products: These tools are mainly used to create solid models of products and their assemblies. However, this type of tool is not primarily developed to support highlevel assembly planning. E.g. Pro-E, Unigraphics, Ideas, Solid Edge ii) Tools for planning and scheduling of manufacturing activities : These tools are focused on the planning and scheduling of manufacturing and assembling activities at the work cell or system level. Generally, software tools under this category are complex and expensive. E.g. Visualization Mockup, TecnoMatrix, 3DVIA Despite of remarkable progresses in digital manufacturing, the technologies for digital assembly are still immature. One critical challenge to all existing software tools is that too many manual involvements are needed to make an assembly plan for complex products, and the level of automation is relatively low. Lot of research is being done to automate the complex assembly planning such as assembly design due to product variants in agile manufacturing etc..

4. AutoAssem: In this seminar, an integrated assembly planning system AutoAssem is introduced that is based on the achievements we made on assembly modeling, assembly sequence planning (ASP), assembly evaluation, and process drawing generation.

5. AutoAssem System Architecture: The main purpose of digital assembly is to assist engineers to make assembly plans, evaluate, and simulate an assembly process for product development. With the aid of a digital assembly system, engineers can minimize potential errors and omissions. AutoAssem is a newly developed digital assembly system. It consists of five main modules:

(1)

Assembly Modeling: This module besides using for modeling parts and their mating relations automatically gathers data for other critical functions such as automatically retrieving the data related to the matting, attributes, and relational matrices of assembly.

(2)

Assembly Sequence Planning(ASP): Based on data obtained from above module, sequence planning is automated through geometric analysis and heuristic algorithms. This system module is also used for evaluating assembly sequence, detecting inconsistency, and estimating assembly cost. An iterative process can be used to refine a sequence if it is necessary.

(3)

Path Planning: Once the sequence of the assemblies is determined, the next step is to define assembly paths for each of assembly operations. This system module can be applied to identify a feasible path between two parts, analyze and evaluate a path by simulation.

(4)

Process Planning and visualization: The process planning and visualization module helps designers to examine an assembly plan vividly. The visualization is based on the sequence of assemblies. The module can also be used to set up the required assembly machine and tools and generate configuration documents for assembly processes. With the information from the planned sequence and paths, this module is able to generate the 3D exploded views for the whole or partial product automatically.

(5)

Assembly Simulation: The assembly simulation module is applied in simulating and evaluating assembly processes dynamically and executing the dynamic gap analysis for assembling. This system module can generate text or video outputs for documentation.

The flow chart represented in Fig 1. relates all the four modules and gives a visualization of all sub modules of the system. Now each individual module is taken and we will describe the methodology of how the module works.

Fig. 1. Flowchart of assembly planning in AutoAssem

6. Methodologies for modules in Autoassem system architecture: 6.1 Assembly Modeling: AutoAssem has been developed for automatic assembly planning of complex products. One critical challenge is to deal with the complexity of aircraft products and the dynamic changes occurred to their design processes. Assembly modeling achieves this by two features.

i.

Object-Oriented Assembly Modeling:

In comparison with the relational models, hierarchical models, and featurebased models used by others for assembly modeling, an object-oriented method is modularized and easy to be implemented. An integrated assembly model is required. This model includes all constituting parts and relations. It also includes the information of the assembly structure of products, attributes, assembly processes, constraints, assembly sequences, assembling paths, and the relations for different types of information. AutoAssem must collect all of the information required by an integrated assembly model, including some information not directly available from a CAD model, such as the standard and the type of the parts. The system module supports modular structure so as to reuse the subassembly made.

ii.

Generation of Assembly Relation Matrix:

An assembly relation matrix describes contact relations, connecting relations and spatial relations of parts. It is critical to ASP. ASP generates contactconnecting matrices, extended interference matrices, and transpose interference matrices to describe the aforementioned relations. It is implemented based on the integration of the gap analysis, the coarse detection with bounding box and the fine detection with approximation. The resulted ASP is able to retrieve relational matrices in the global coordinate system or local coordinate system automatically [4]. The system is capable of detecting the orientation, detecting and exposing objects.

6.2 Assembly sequence planning(ASP): ASP has integrated the geometric filtering algorithm with other intelligent algorithms. The best plan can be found based on a comparison of the results from those algorithms. The new filtering algorithm ensures the feasibility of a path in product assembling [5]. Five design criteria in ASP are parallelism, continuity, stability, direction, and pairablilty. ASP selects an optimized sequence and corresponding paths based on these design criteria. To achieve the best performance, the ASP system module includes a set of advanced heuristic algorithms such as ant colony algorithm, genetic algorithm, and particle swarm optimization [6][7][8] Representation of assembly sequence: In AutoAssem, the fish bone diagram is used to represent an assembly sequence. As shown in Fig. 2, the root of an assembly tree corresponds to the fish head. Big bones link to the vertebral and small bones represent the subassemblies or parts at a lower level. The positions of the bones represent the sequence when an object on a bone node is assembled. The assembly sequence of a complex product may have more than two levels of assemblies. In that case, a bone node can be used to represent a sub fish bone diagram.

Fig.2. Fish bone diagram for assembly sequence

Users can save, zoom in, and zoom out the diagram as needed. The fish bone diagram is simple and intuitive, and it provides all information that is related to the assembly sequence as well as the relationships between different assembly levels.

Evaluation of Assembly Plan:

Assembly evaluation is functioned to assess the utilities of the alternatives of assembly sequences and select the best one with the best performance. The system evaluates the assembly process using nine indicators assembly, constraints, redirection number, parts quality, parts symmetry, connection type, polymerization, assembly number on gravity direction, and assembly relation. A scale from 1 to 5 is used as a weight to lump-up the values of indicators. Assembly evaluation can be performed with different combinations from these indicators.

6.3 Visualization of Assembly plan Exploded views and assembly graphs are very important components for the assembly processes. Blueprints based on assembly graphs have been used widely at all stages of the product life cycle, such as product design evaluation, the 3D demonstration, animation of exploding, and collapsing in marketing promotion. AutoAssem proposed a new automatic method to generate exploded view based on assembly sequence and bounding box. This new method is similar to the phenomenon of a real explosion process. The system uses the assembly sequence and the geometric information of the parts, the scopes of local and global explosions can be distinguished, and thus creating the local and global exploded views accordingly. The system is capable of creating the exploded lines for all parts automatically. The resulting exploded view from the system is very straightforward and easy to understand

Fig.3. Exploded graphic of assembly sequence

Various graphical views like the figure shown in Fig 3 can be created so as to enable better visualization of the process and helps in understanding and planning better.

6.4 Simulation of Assembly process: Dynamic simulation of assembly process has been widely used to detect the errors of the product design. Similarly, dynamic simulation can also be used to validate the result of assembly planning. It is known that no artificial system is perfect, and it is particularly true when an assembly planning system is for complex products. Dynamic simulation serves as the last mechanism to verify the assembly plan and determine if it is necessary to make an appropriate modification to the assembly sequence or generated paths. Dynamic simulation ensures the quality of assembly design. On the other hand, dynamic simulation can also be used for staff training, assembly or maintenance guidance, product promotion, and program development. All of these applications are important to the success of assembly planning. AutoAssem retrieves the data regarding assembly sequence, paths, and processes from an integrated assembly plan. To perform a simulation, the system executes the dynamic gap analysis and generates the steps of assembling automatically. 7. Conclusion: The complexity of assembly planning can increase exponentially as the number of parts in a product increases. A complex product usually has a large number of parts. It is challenging and error-prone to make an assembly plan intuitively by designers. The adoption of a digital manufacturing approach for assembly planning of complex products makes it possible to generate, analyze and evaluate feasible assembly designs in a short time. Digital assembly will improve the success ratio for onetime assembly, reducing the cost of product by making an optimal assembly plan.

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