A geometric algorithm for single selective disassembly using the wave propagation abstraction

Disassembling a selected component from an assembly, defined as selective disassembly, is important for applications such as maintenance, recycling and reuse. This paper presents a geometric algorithm to solve the following selective disassembly problem: given an assembly and a selected component to be disassembled, determine the disassembly sequence with minimum component removals (motions), defined as an optimum sequence. We propose an abstraction “wave propagation” that analyzes the assembly from the selected component outwards, and orders the components for selective disassembly. The main contributions of this research are: (1) determining an optimal disassembly sequence; (2) reducing the search space by analyzing a subset of components in the assembly; and (3) providing a polynomial average complexity algorithm. The proposed selective disassembly approach applies to both two dimensional and three-dimensional assemblies.