Automatic Generation of Product Disassembly Sequences

Assessment of service difficulties at the concept stages of product design coupled with an existing methocology for estimating assembly difficulties would help in the assessment of life cycle costs. The authors are investigating procedures which can be used to assess service difficulties and costs at the early stages of product design. A central part of this work is generation of required disassembly sequences for identified service of repair items. This paper describes a model of assemblies which has been developed for this purpose with the associated search algorithms. To facilitate the required search procedures, the concept of disassembly diagram was introduced. The relationships between this diagram, the assembly model and the search procedures are illustrated in the paper by a simple example. © 1991 CIRP