Dynamic assembly simplification for virtual assembly process of complex product

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -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.

Dynamic assembly simplification for virtual assembly process of complex product in cloud computing environment

“…For the assembly features recognition problem in Figure 14, Table 1 shows the comparison of performances between the algorithm using the divide-and-conquer strategy 27 and the proposed assembly features recognition approach. In order to explore the concrete relationship between the matching time and the complexity of the to-be-matched component (here, it refers to a dynamic assembly), suppose the face number of a given form feature (e.g.…”

“…Section ''CAD model simplification with assembly features preservation'' discusses dynamic assembly simplification method with assembly features preservation, and the focus is assembly features recognition based on conjugated subgraphs matching using MapReduce (MR). Section ''Results and analysis'' demonstrates the performance of the proposed approach and shows experimental comparison of this approach with the one presented in Xiao et al 27 Conclusions are drawn in the final section.…”

“…Xiao et al 26,27 presented CAD model simplification methods with assembly features preservation, which create prerequisites for delivering 3D AO to assembly field using mobile devices. Fast recognition of assembly features is the core algorithm.…”

“…The problem of assembly features recognition has been translated into conjugated subgraphs matching. Based on the Ullmann algorithm 26 and the divide-and-conquer strategy, 27 assembly features can be recognized in real time when the scale of the corresponding graphs is not too large. As the scale of the conjugated subgraphs matching problem keeps increasing, the previous algorithms need to be improved to keep their efficiency.…”

Automatic Assembly Design for Engineering-to-Order Products Based on Multiple Models and Assembly Features

“…In [15], mating features are defined as those features that comprise mating relations between parts to be assembled. In [16,17], a method that simplifies complex products to achieve a virtual assembly modeling process in real time is presented. Here, form features are defined as generic shapes useful in computer-aided design applications, and assembly features are the connections between form features.…”