Research On Assembly Sequence Planning Based On Ant Colony Algorithm

Assembly is the end of manufacture process, assembly quality affect product's performance in high degree, and assembly cost is a big part of the manufacture cost. So pre-assembly and analyzing in design and assembly programming is more important for improving product's quality and reducing production cost.In this paper, a product assembly model is built based on digraph. The feasible assembly direction of the parts is deduced from the interference matrix. In the paper, an approach of extract the interference information from a three-dimensional CAD model automatically is proposed, the approach, which is based on the format and character of the interference matrix, is researched and introduced in detail; the realization of the approach is by using Pro/Toolkit to redevelop the Pro/E software in the programming environment of VC++.The assembly sequence planning is a kind of combination optimization problem. In order to solve this kind of problems, ant colony algorithm is applied based on the character of the algorithm. The algorithm in the paper is improved to solve the assembly sequence planning which is a multi-object and of multi-constraint problem. It can deduce the feasible assembly direction based on the interference matrix and transfer to the next part and update the pheromone on the route based on the changes of some constraint conditions such as the change number of the directions of the assembly parts or the assembly tools.In the end of this article, a prototype system of the algorithm is realized. And examples are calculated by using this system. And the results are compared with the results from gene algorithm. Finally, the whole article is summarized as well as the next necessary work is pointed out.