An approach for assembly process case discovery using multimedia information source

Abstract

Assembly process design (APD) is a time-consuming and error-prone activity of complex product manufacturing. Assembly process reuse can efficiently improve the process design quality and shorten design cycle. With the rapid development of digital technologies, the information source, which stores reusable information of an existing APD result, becomes multiple and heterogeneous multimedia, e.g. text, 3D model, even images and videos. Currently, most researches focused on using single and structured information source, there has been very little research on how to use multimedia information source. For reusing assembly process, one appropriate way is to capture assembly process case (APC) from existing APD result, retrieve an APC similar to the new assembly and modify the process of retrieved APC to generate assembly process of new assembly. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to discover assembly process case for assembly process reuse using multimedia information source. First, the integrated representation of APC is constructed, which consists of hierarchical topological structure and sematic assembly process concept. Then, by multimedia dismantling and single-medium parsing, the assembly process information is extracted uniformly from multimedia information source. Moreover, the process similarity between new assembly and APC is calculated to retrieve the reusable APC. The process similarity calculation is comprehensively accomplished from two aspects: applying graph algorithm to calculate the topological structure similarity and applying weighted bipartite graph to calculate the assembly process concepts similarity. Finally, an illustrative case study is performed to analyze the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The result showed that the proposed approach can build an APC library from multimedia information source and help assembly process designers to discover APC for assembly process reuse.