APE: an experience-based assembly sequence planner for mechanical assemblies

This paper presents an approach to the assembly sequence planning problem based on a "plan reuse" philosophy, called the Assembly Planner using Experience (APE). Assembly planning research in the past has attempted to completely plan each problem from scratch. This research shows that stored cases of basic assembly configurations can be applied to a given assembly problem. It is observed that the number of such basic assembly configurations is quite small. Constraints affecting the assembly are also explicitly handled.