Choosing Virtual Assembly Basic Component Based on the K-Means Clustering Algorithm and the Digraph Analysis

Virtual assembly process planning (VAPP) is one of the most important technologies of virtual assembly, and seeking the basic component is the most basic step of virtual assembly process planning, using this kind of technology can not only reduce the cost of traditional assembly training, but also achieve the high efficient maintenance purpose. In order to realize the automatic VAPP, this paper proposes a method that based on a clustering algorithm and a digraph analysis method. Here, this paper introduce the K-Means clustering algorithm into three dimensional space objects clustering calculation, and K-Means is usually used in two dimensional space. Then, the digraph analysis method (DAM) is been used to judge which one will be the most reasonable choice for the basic component among all the choices that have been calculated by the K-Means algorithm. Finally we reuse the K-Means algorithm and the digraph analysis method for several times to find the basic components for each assembly step. Thus the virtual assembly process sequence can be extracted automatically.