Dynamic assembly simplification for virtual assembly process of complex product

Abstract

Purpose

Virtual assembly process plays an important role in assembly design of complex product and is typically time- and resource-intensive. This paper aims to investigate a dynamic assembly simplification approach in order to demonstrate and interact with virtual assembly process of complex product in real time.

Design/methodology/approach

The proposed approach regards the virtual assembly process of complex product as an incremental growth process of dynamic assembly. During the growth process, the current-assembled-state assembly model is simplified with appearance preserved by detecting and removing its invisible features, and the to-be-assembled components are simplified with assembly features preserved using conjugated subgraphs matching method based on an improved subgraph isomorphism algorithm.

Findings

The dynamic assembly simplification approach is applied successfully to reduce the complexity of computer aided design models during the virtual assembly process and it is proved by several cases.

Originality/value

A new assembly features definition is proposed based on the notion of “conjugation” to assist the assembly features recognition, which is a main step of the dynamic assembly simplification and has been translated into conjugated subgraphs matching problem. And an improved subgraph isomorphism algorithm is presented to address this problem.

Citation

Xiao, H., Li, Y., Yu, J.-F. and Cheng, H. (2014), "Dynamic assembly simplification for virtual assembly process of complex product", Assembly Automation, Vol. 34 No. 1, pp. 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1108/AA-12-2012-093