Automatic generation of disassembly sequences and exploded views from solidworks symbolic geometric relationships

Planning the optimal assembly and disassembly sequence plays a critical role when optimizing the production, maintenance and recycling of products. For tackling this problem, a recursive branch-and-bound algorithm was developed for finding the optimal disassembly plan. It takes into consideration the traveling distance of a robotic end effector along with a cost penalty when it needs to be changed. The precedences and part decoupling directions are automatically computed in the proposed geometric reasoning engine by analyzing the spatial relationships present in SolidWorks assemblies. For accelerating the optimization process, a best-first search algorithm was implemented for quickly finding an initial disassembly sequence solution that is used as an upper bound for pruning most of the non-optimal tree branches. For speeding up the search further, a caching technique was developed for reusing feasible disassembly operations computed on previous search steps, reducing the computational time by more than 18%. As a final stage, our SolidWorks add-in generates an exploded view animation for allowing intuitive analysis of the best solution found. For testing our approach, the disassembly of two starter motors and a single cylinder engine was performed for assessing the capabilities and time requirements of our algorithms.