In the modern global economy, automotive manufactures need to shorten the product development time and concurrently improve the design for new products, However, the majority of assembly planning tasks in automobile body design is stilt manually performed by assembly designers according to their experiences. This has prolonged the production lead time and time to market. This paper describes a procedure to automatically derive all the feasible assembly sequences for automobile body assembly. This procedure is based on a mathematical model of the automobile body, obtained through the definitions of the connection matrix and contracted matrix. These two matrices represent the precedence constraint knowledge among components and subassemblies. The possible subassemblies are automatically detected by satisfying some mathematical conditions applicable to these matrices. For each subassembly and the whole product, all the possible assembly sequences are generated by rearranging the initial connection sub-matrix and the contracted matrix. The procedure can solve the 'combinatorial explosion' problem efficiently by hierarchical subassembly detection.
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