Assembly variant design methodology

The distributed and horizontally integrated manufacturing environment in Agile Manufacturing (AM) paradigm demands for new product development methods that posses favorable advantages over conventional manufacturing approaches developed for vertically integrated environments. To cater for this need, this paper discusses the assembly variant design methodology. First, the complementary assembly modeling concept is briefly introduced, which is further materialized as two kinds of assembly models: assembly variants model (AVM) and assembly mating graphs (AMG). The former explicitly captures the hierarchical and functional relationships between constituent components while the latter explicitly captures the mating relationships at the manufacturing feature level. Then the assembly variant design methodology, which is based on these assembly models, is developed based on the concept of Constraint Group (CG). The matching components are searched and retrieved from the AVM and then the CGs are identified by manipulating the AMGs. Finally, the assembly variant design process is formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem which is solved using a standard solver. Numerical examples are given to verify the feasibility of this method. This framework provides a systematic approach to facilitate the variant design of complex assembly products in the agile manufacturing environment. Assembly, Variant Design, Constraint Group, Agile Manufacturing.