A hierarchical approach to disassembly sequence planning for mechanical product

An important aspect of design for the life cycle is assessing the disassemblability of products. This paper presents a novel approach to automatic generation of disassembly sequence from hierarchical attributed liaison graph (HALG) representation of an assembly through recursively decomposing the assembly into subassemblies. In order to increase the planning efficiency, the HALG is built according to the knowledge in engineering, design and demanufacturing domains. In this method, the boundary representation (B-Rep) models are simplified by removing the hidden surfaces to reduce the computational complexity of disassembly planning. For each layer of HALG, the subassembly selection indices defined in terms of mobility, stability, and parallelism are proposed to evaluate the extracted tentative subassemblies and select the preferred subassemblies. To verify the validity and efficiency of the approach, a variety of assemblies including some complicated products are tested, and the corresponding results are presented.