Disassembly Liaison Graphs Inspired by Word Clouds

Liaison or connection graphs depict physical mates between components in a graphical representation but do not incorporate any precedence relations or order of assembly or disassembly of components. For the context of disassembly, we developed a method to graphically show not only the physical mates between components but also the disassembly precedence relations amongst all the components. The transformation of a liaison graph into a weighted liaison graph (WLG) is inspired by the generation of word clouds from the visual design domain where component nodes are weighted and colored to depict disassembly precedence relations. A WLG allows users to quickly comprehend the order of disassembly and component embeddedness.