Physically Feasible Decomposition of Engino$^{\circledR}$ Toy Models: A Graph Theoretic Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a graph-theoretic method to automatically generate step-by-step assembly instructions for Engino toy models, ensuring physical feasibility and hierarchical decomposition.

Contribution

It presents a novel graph-based approach and algorithms for automatically decomposing toy models into assembly sequences, improving over manual instruction creation.

Findings

Algorithm successfully generates assembly instructions for toy models.

Hierarchical decomposition ensures physical feasibility of assembly steps.

Modified graph algorithms effectively model the assembly process.

Abstract

During the 125th European Study Group with Industry held in Limassol, Cyprus, 5-9 December 2016, one of the participating companies, Engino.net Ltd, posed a very interesting challenge to the members of the study group. Engino.net Ltd is a Cypriot company, founded in 2004, that produces a series of toy sets -- the Engino$^{\circledR}$ toy sets -- consisting of a number of building blocks which can be assembled by pupils to compose toy models. Depending on the contents of a particular toy set, the company has developed a number of models that can be built utilizing the blocks present in the set, however the production of a step-by-step assembly manual for each model could only be done manually. The goal of the challenge posed by the company was to implement a procedure to automatically generate the assembly instructions for a given toy. In the present paper we propose a graph-theoretic approach to model the problem and provide a series of results to solve it by employing modified versions of well established algorithms in graph theory. An algorithmic procedure to obtain a hierarchical, physically feasible decomposition of a given toy model, from which the assembly instructions can be recovered, is proposed.