Intelligent Decision Support for Assembly System Design

The design of an assembly system is a complex problem, often requiring large teams of engineers with significant experience and expertise. Based on studies of the product design, these teams must select an assembly sequence, generate a corresponding process plan, identify the resources capable of completing the tasks in the process plan, and group these resources into a system of workstations to accomplish the required assembly operations. The resulting system must be economically viable but have sufficient capacity to meet production requirements. The successful, timely design of such an assembly system depends on the team's ability to effectively share and communicate large volumes of information and have rapid feedback concerning cost, producibility, quality, and other important engineering criteria. Unfortunately, few available tools focus on fabrication or assembly: Those tools that do are often unable to share data. As a result, design teams are forced to do much of the work manually and are unable to effectively share information. Even large manufacturers find their teams spending considerable efforts just to enter the same data into multiple computer systems. Much work has been done to address various aspects of the assembly