Abstract
Because of their intuitive interface, mating conditions have been prevalently used in assembly modelling. Besides their use for modelling purposes, other type of information, such as spatial relationships between parts and local degrees of freedom, can be directly derived from mating conditions. This information in turn can be used in various engineering analysis applications, such as kinematics analysis or automatic tolerance chain generation for tolerance analysis. In this paper, application of mating conditions in an assembly sequence-planning task is investigated. The proposed approach mainly engages the mating information represented in the CAD assembly model to automatically generate sequence plans based on the minimization of the number of assembly directions.