Abstract
Subassembly partition is an important process in hull block building as it greatly affects the efficiency and quality of the assembly work. Recently, an experience-based method has been widely applied to the subassembly partition process, which consumes much design time and manpower, thus causing more challenges toward a more highly automated and efficient stage in this process. To shorten the gap, an automated subassembly partition method is presented in this study. First, the assembly information model is defined with essential attributes and topological relations of the parts. Second, an optimization model is established with consideration of a trade-off between the intra-cluster cohesion and cluster number on the premise of satisfying certain constraints. After that, considering the fuzziness and diversity of the subassembly partition problem, a two-dimensional coding discrete particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is developed. Finally, two blocks are demonstrated as instances to verify the proposed method, and the results show that the proposed method is feasible and applicable to the block with a flat structure.