An Intelligent Strategy for Automated Assembly Sequence Planning While Considering DFA Concept

Abstract

Recent advancement in Design For Assembly (DFA) has driven product designers towards minimizing the number of parts in a product so as to reduce the assembly efforts and cost. Many industries are using the DFA concept on their own and there is no particular method or automation to apply the DFA concept for the products. However, there is also no particular method to develop assembly sequence along with applying the DFA concept for the industrial products. In manufacturing, 30% of time consumption is only due to assembly operation as compared to the remaining processes in manufacturing. By application of DFA concept to the products, not only we can reduce the time of the assembly but also we can reduce the manufacturing part number also. As the part number reduces in the assembly, manufacturing cost of the parts and assembly of the parts also drastically reduces. There exists many Computer Aided Design (CAD) based and Artificial Intelligence (AI) based methods to obtain the optimum feasible assembly sequence for the reduced number of parts obtained from the DFA concept. In this research, a novel method is implemented to automate the assembly sequence planning with the help of AI techniques along with the DFA concept. The proposed methodology has been implemented to an industrial product in order to validate the assembly sequence.