A novel approach to assembly modular partition for a mechanical product based on the theory of universal gravity

Abstract

Assembly planning is one of the NP complete problems, which is harder to solve complex product. Decomposition of a complex product into smaller units is an effective method to solve this problem. This study presents a simple and an effective approach to partition assembly based on the law of universal gravity. Assembly product is expressed as assembly semantic relation model (ASRM). The algorithm assumes that each functional component is a celestial body with mass, which calculated by the combination of assembly semantic information with the neighboring components. Functional components are clustered respectively to corresponding magnetism celestial component by magnitude of the gravitational force. The average universal gravity in each cluster is a criteria to evaluate the decomposition of ASRM. An example has been provided to demonstrate the proposed approach.