Using flower pollinating with artificial bees (FPAB) technique to determine machinable volumes in process planning for prismatic parts

Process planning (PP) has an important role in manufacturing systems design and operations. Volume decomposition and machinable volumes (MVs) or machining features determination is the core activity in process planning. This process requires extraction of elementary volumes (EVs), merging or clustering EVs to construct feasible MVs and finally selecting an optimal combination of MVs. Development of MVs is an important activity, so that better solution is obtained by better developed MVs. Generation of limited number of MVs or machining features, which is often performed by experts may miss the optimal solution. Also, using exact methods such as combinatorial optimization not only generate infeasible MVs, but also require an excessive amount of computational time. In this research, the meta-heuristic procedure of flower pollinating by artificial bees (FPAB) is used in manufacturing context to generate and assess the feasibility of MVs. Furthermore, a set-covering method is used to select the optimal solution. The performance of the proposed model is assessed through some numerical examples. The encouraging results of the numerical examples demonstrate good performance of the proposed method in machining feature or machinable volumes determination problem (MVDP).