On the Creation of a Unified Modeling Language Based Collaborative Virtual Assembly/Disassembly System

Design For Assembly/disassembly (DFA) allows systematic evaluations and analysis of product assembly and disassembly during the product design stage with the goal of reducing assembly costs, improving quality and shortening time to market. These evaluations include assemblability, disassemblability, part accessibility, and part layout [1]. With the growing availability and widespread use of high bandwidth network and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, the issues involved with product assembly, disassembly may be addressed and resolved effectively in a collaborative virtual environment over the Internet. In this paper, an analysis on the framework and definition of a collaborative virtual assembly and disassembly system, called Motive3D [2, 3], is introduced and examined using Unified Modeling Language (UML) [4]. UML is an Object Management Group’s (OMG) standard for object-oriented analysis and software design method, which allows specifying, constructing, visualizing, and documenting a distributed software-intensive system. Carrying out systematic analysis on the Motive3D system using UML, we believe that it expedites system development and will be possible to expedite the product design cycle and enable the assembly and disassembly process over Internet, and thus reduce the assembly and disassembly process bottlenecks.