Assembly process planning and its future in collaborative manufacturing: a review

A good assembly process plan can increase the efficiency and quality, and decrease the cost and time of the whole product manufacturing process, which is important as product and production demand changes rapidly in today's market. Several approaches using different techniques and methodologies have been developed and reported in the literature for assembly process planning. Automated assembly process planning (AAPP) has been the main focus of the research efforts over the years, with most work concentrated on attempting to automate or to semi-automate the key sequencing process. However, some of these efforts have not been successful in general, and many assembly process plans are still based on traditional methods. The purpose of this paper is to review and outline the methodologies and tools in assembly process planning developed during the past ten years, such as the application of meta-heuristics methods to find the optimal/near optimal assembly plans and assembly line balancing, the evaluation methods for design for assembly (DFA), and collaborative assembly process planning systems. Based on this review the future trends in this area are also identified and discussed.