The Simulation of Disassembly Tasks - Annotated Bibliography Example

The paper "The Simulation of Disassembly Tasks" is an excellent example of an annotated bibliography on information technology. Iker, A, Diego B & Luis, M, (2007) "Path‐planning techniques for the simulation of disassembly tasks", Assembly Automation, Vol. 27 Iss: 3, pp.207 – 214. DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/01445150710763222 This article aims at developing path-planning techniques that support a general selective disassembly in a virtual reality environment. The first path-planning technique is based on single translations, while the second one is based on the generation of a random search tree.

The methods that are used in the support are adapted and modified from available robotic path-planning methods. According to the research findings, the proposed techniques are applicable to the automatic generation of disassembly sequences. One significant requirement of the aerospace industry is the ability to show that all the industry’s products are serviced during the airport’s operations. This requirement is defined in the product’s design phase with the need of building components physical mock-ups.

The mock-ups are used to test the new design maintenance operations. The cost for these mock-ups is very high for some products such as turbopropulsor. Besides, any defect that is detected in the physical prototyping stage needs to be returned to the design table to redesign the product and construct a new mock-up. This delays the project and increases the cost of product development. The authors, Iker, Diego, and Luis propose the application of VR technique as an effective way of reducing these delays and costs.

The VR technique provides the engineering team with tools that allow decision making before the construction of a physical mock-up. The tools should be capable of simulating maintenance operations in a realistic way so as to be considered useful. Such ideas led to the emergence of REVIMA project whose main goals are to create hardware and software tools that can reasonably simulate the maintenance operations on aircraft engines and equipment. In summary, the authors have a lot of knowledge about a path-planning technique which they present to the readers in an informative way.

The information provided in the journal is timely, descriptive and well researched. Iker Aguinaga, Diego Borro & Luis Matey, (2007) "Path‐planning techniques for the simulation of disassembly tasks", Assembly Automation, Vol. 27 Iss: 3, pp.207 – 214. DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/01445150710763222 This article presents its work into various sections. The first section describes the previous work on disassembly planning that bases the sequencing problem on the product.

The input of the planning is not a product geometrical representation but contact graph and precedence information given by the end-users. The main objective of the work in this section is to analyze the different sequences to obtain optimal or near-optimal planning. The authors present a tool that can evaluate and simulate assembly plans in the simulation of assembly or disassembly operations. The next section describes the automatic disassembly planning. The disassembly planner produces the sequence part removal needed to extract a certain part from an assembly.

This operation is distinctive in the maintenance operation simulation, were, a part must be removed because it is either malfunctioning or has reached its expected end of life. To create a selective disassembly planner, there are several subproblems that must be resolved. These include the collision detection problem and selective maintenance simulator problem that arises from resource usage and execution time. The next section describes the proposed method of disassembly planning. This method uses several path planning strategies.

It does not require any user interaction or input information other than the selection of the component aimed for maintenance. The method comprises two main phases, which include a pre-processing phase that produces a spatial partitioning and detects the contacts among different components. The other one is the runtime phase that generates the disassembly sequence for the target part. The authors describe the generation of the scene spatial partition and the determination of the surfaces in contact among different parts as the main goal for the pre-processing phase.

The information provided about disassembly planning is deep and relevant as it explains the development of path planning.