## 1 Introduction  
With the pursuit of sustainable development, improving construction efficiency, and reducing energy consumption, prefabricated building systems have been recognized as one of the alternative solutions to changing conventional construction methods [1, 2, 3]. Predabricated building components are a key element of prefabricated construction systems. These components are manufactured off-site in mechanized plants and then transported to the construction site for assembly instead of manually operated at sites in the traditional cast-in-situ concrete construction [4]. They include various elements such as precast walls, floors, columns, beams, and stairs. Prefabricated construction involves the production, transportation, and installation of prefabricated building components (PBCs) [5]. Furthermore, the lifting and assembly of precast components, such as precast walls and floors, is a prominent feature and an indispensable part of prefabricated building construction [6]. An appropriate assembly sequence not only can accelerate the construction progress and avoid difficulties in component assembly but also provide suggestive instruction for upstream enterprises, such as supply chain and transportation. However, most of the assembly sequence planning is determined by practitioners based on their experience. To this end, assembly sequence planning and optimization (ASPO) of precast components has been an emerging research topic. Although ASPO in prefabricated construction is still in its infancy, efforts have been made to study the assembly or disassembly sequence planning and optimization (DSPO)in the manufacturing industry, especially for mechanical assembly bodies [7]. From the research in the mechanism domain, to tackle this ASPO or DSPO problem, the first thing is to establish a model, objectively reflecting the real problem, especially the topological relationships between components. The representation of a product structure directly affects the efficiency of an assembly sequence search [8]. Graph-based modeling [9; 10], AND/OR graph modeling [11; 12], Petri net (PN) modeling [13; 14], and matrix-based modeling [15; 16] methods are frequently adopted to describe mechanical products. However, previous studies on ASPO of prefabricated components omitted the topological relationships when modeling, although they considered the influence of interference relationships between components on assembly sequence. In a word, there are three limitations or difficulties to be overcome in current research. (1) When establishing the model, there is a need to consider and describe the components' topological relationships comprehensively. (2) The current process lacks the ability to automatically extract and summarize the information on components, including their basic properties and, crucially, their topological relationships. (3) The absence of a well-considered selection process for intelligent algorithms poses a challenge in determining whether a high-quality solution can be obtained within a reasonable time frame. Hence, this research aims to tackle the challenge of attaining a high-quality assembly sequence for prefabricated building components while effectively addressing the identified limitations above. To achieve this objective, a comprehensive framework is proposed. Firstly, a matrix-based modeling method is applied to express the topological relationships between components, where an adjacency matrix and interference matrix are adopted. Secondly, a graph database is employed to store the massive amounts of information in the BIM model, particularly the spatial topological relationships of components. This not only makes information retrieval and interaction convenient but also lays the data foundation for the matrix-based modeling method. And the subsequent construction information can also be extended into the graph database.