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Designing an assembly system is a complex task that is broken down into different steps that deal with various representations of the product, the assembly plan and the assembly process plan. Each step faces a huge combinatorial explosion problem. Many research works have focused on the generation of assembly plans. They often fail to represent the logistic functions (choice of primary/secondary subassemblies and their orientations implying specific logistic operations). The resulting assembly sequences are therefore not fully satisfactory from an operational point of view. In the 1990s, the concept of the Functional Assembly Plan (FAP) was introduced to refine the assembly plans with these key inputs that are essential to consider before proceeding with the next step concerning the assembly process plan. However, in the literature, there is no method to systematically generate, evaluate, and select the most relevant FAPs. In this paper, we propose an original semi-automated method to generate FAPs and to evaluate them. The proposed procedure is based on a branch-and-bound algorithm that allows the user to find the "best" FAP, according to predefined evaluation criteria, without evaluating each potential FAP. The proposed method combines automated steps and user's intervention to limit the phenomenon of combinatorial explosion and to make the solution explainable. This method and its associated procedure have been used to improve an existing software, CapLog, efficient for the optimization of manufacturing systems, like end-of-life systems or assembly systems. A case study is used to illustrate the steps of the proposed method. |
