Information model for collaborative assembly planning

In order to deal with collaboration between assembly design team and assembly planning team of complex products, (a concept of assembly knot was proposed to integrate product assembly information description.) And an assembly knot-based assembly relationship graph was set up. The information of part and assembly were described independently by using attributes of vertexes and edges in the graph respectively. An algorithm was presented to decompose the assembly relationship graph based on its cut vertexes and a share-part based hierarchal tree was then constructed. The collaborative work information was depicted by the hierarchal tree. An example was provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the information modeling process oriented to collaborative assembly planning and the model.