This paper presents an efficient collision detection algorithm designed to support assembly and maintenance simulation of complex assemblies. This approach exploits the surface knowledge, available from CAD models, to determine intersecting surfaces. It proposes a novel combination of Overlapping Axis-Aligned Bounding Box (OAABB) and R-tree structures to gain considerable performance improvements. This paper also shows an efficient traversal algorithm based on the R-tree structure of Axis-Aligned Bounding Boxes to determine intersecting objects and intersecting surfaces between three- dimensional components, for supporting the recognition of constraints in assembly and disassembly operations in virtual prototyping environments. The implementation of the proposed collision detection algorithm, known as S-CD (Surface Collision Detection) toolkit, performs well against moderately complex industrial case studies. Current experimental results show that S-CD is effective in determining intersecting surfaces at interactive rates with moderately complex real case studies.