Assembly:Rolling assembly

Parallel Assembly

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.

A six-component part is assembled in 3 stages

Rolling Assembly

As noted above, assembly of two parts can fail. 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 and the required parts scheduled for assembly. The figure on the right shows a simple example of this effect.

With an approach to assembly called Rolling Assembly, a stage of assembly is scheduled twice a week and and pairwise assemblies that have been ordered and whose parts are available are scheduled for simultaneous assembly during one stage. Successful results from that assembly and new orders are then scheduled for the next stage of assembly.