Assembly:Rolling assembly

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Parallel Assembly

A six-component part is assembled in 3 stages

BioBrick systems may contain many parts.

One could spend many weeks building a 50-part system by assembling the first two parts, adding the third part, adding the fourth part, and so on. However, because BioBrick assembly is composable, assembly need not be done sequentially. By performing multiple pairwise assemblies in parallel, a long assembly can be done in stages. The total amount of work is about the same, but the number of stages is the log (base 2) of the length of the assembly.

We call this system Parallel Assembly and have tools to manage the assembly of many BioBrick systems at the same time.



Rolling Assembly

Sometimes, assembly of two parts fails. During parallel assembly, the failure of an assembly does not normally require an extra stage of assembly. Instead, during planning for the next stage, the failed assembly can simply be ignored while the successful parts continue to be used for assembly. The figure on the right shows how assembly would continue even if one of the three stage I assemblies failed in our example.


An example of rolling assembly. Assemblies keep rolling along, even if some fail.