A system engineering approach to automated assembly planning

The problem of generating assembly plans is exam-ined from the viewpoint of totally automating the manufacturing process. In particular, it is assumed that automation is used to generate assembly plans from design data and robot programs from the as-sembly plans. The exploration is conducted by de-termining what knowledge must be shared between robot programmers and assembly planners, and by considering the impact, on assembly plans, of design variations within a simple product line. PROCESS AND ASSEMBLY PLANS A process plan specifies selections among manufac-turing techniques and, thus, designates choices be-tween fabrication methods such as extrusion an