Title: Modeling Automatic Assembly and Disassembly Operations for Virtual 
Manufacturing*


Swee M. Mok
Motorola Inc.
1301 East Algonquin Road	             
Schaumburg, Illinois 60196		 
e-mail: asm001@email.mot.com		 

C-H. Wu
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering	      
Northwestern University		              
Evanston, IL 60208		       
e-mail: chwu@ece.nwu.edu 		        

D. T. Lee
Institute of Information Science
Academia Sinica
Nankang, Taipei, Taiwan
e-mail: dtlee@iis.sinica.edu.tw

* Supported in part by the National Science Foundation under the 
  Grant CCR-9731638, and by the National Science Council under 
  the Grant NSC-89-2213-E-001-012.

Abstract:

A system for evaluating products in their design phase has been 
developed for virtual manufacturing. It is integrated into a CAD/CAM 
environment to calculate cost for assembling and disassembling parts. 
In our earlier work, a generic assembly and disassembly model was developed 
to represent operations required for product manufacturing and de-manufacturing.
To be useful, the model requires a method for translating high-level 
instructions from product designers into low-level assembly and disassembly 
instructions. This paper presents a set of rules for accomplishing this task. 
The developed rules are used for manipulating strings representing parts 
and handlers in binary assembly and disassembly operations. A telephone 
assembly and disassembly simulation is used to illustrate the developed system.


IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, PART A: Systems and Humans, 
to appear.