An ASP Based Solution to Mechanical Assembly Sequence Planning

Abstract

Declarative methods for planning problems admit highly efficient and understandable problem description. Mechanical Assembly Sequence Planning (MASP) is a kind of planning problem that is difficult and of great importance in industrial production. This paper proposes a novel Answer Set Programming (ASP) based declarative solution to MASP. Given a CAD model of an assembly, all assembly knowledge and necessary constraints can be produced automatically. With the answer set solver DLV all assembly sequences could be generated. And thanks to the declarativeness of the method the representation efficiency and time efficiency of the method can be improved separately.