Reducing the complexity of geometric selective disassembly

This paper presents an efficient technique for determining a low-cost disassembly sequence suitable to extract a subset of s components from an assembly containing n components, e of which are exterior (e/spl Lt/n). The most efficient solution to this so-called geometric selective disassembly problem is the wave propagation algorithm, which is reported to have a computational complexity of O(sn/sup 2/). Instead, the complexity of the proposed algorithm is O(enlogn) when s/spl Lt/n, and O(sn) when s/spl sime/n. Experimental results with synthetic 3D assemblies are presented.