Disassembly plan approach based on subassembly concept

For complex products, the generation of an assembly or disassembly plan becomes a difficult task as the assembly parts' numbers increase. To bypass this problem, the use of a subassembly concept represents an original technique. It aims to organize the multipart assembly product into some subassembly encapsulation. Each subassembly contains, relatively, a small number of parts. As a result, the assembly or disassembly plan problem becomes between the identified subassemblies and, in that case, can be generated easily. Despite the attractiveness of the subassembly concept, the identification of subassemblies from the CAD model product remains a relevant research subject to be improved. In fact, the resolution of the precedence relation problem from the CAD model data constitutes the biggest difficulty of this technique. In this work, a novel disassembly plan approach based on a subassembly concept is presented. The proposed approach starts with the investigation of the CAD assembly data to extract a contact matrix. Then, the extracted matrix is enriched by assembling conditions in order to search the set of base parts initiating subassemblies. Once the subassemblies were recognized, a new subassembly interference matrix is regenerated. The disassembly plan is carried out, between the known subassemblies, using a simplification method of subassemblies interference matrix. An example of the CAD assembly product is treated during this paper to clarify the different steps of the proposed approach. The simulated results of both subassembly identification and disassembly plan were compared to examples given by the literature in order to validate the developed approach.