SEQUENCE OPTIMIZATION OF HOLE-MAKING OPERATIONS FOR INJECTION MOULD USING SHUFFLED FROG LEAPING ALGORITHM WITH MODIFICATION

Tool travel and tool switch planning are the two major issues in hole-making operations of industrial part which involves drilling, tapping etc. operations. It is necessary to find the sequence of operations, which minimizes the total non productive time and tool switch time of hole-making operations depending upon the hole location and the tool sequence to be followed. In this work, an attempt is made to reduce total non-productive time and tool switch time of hole-making operations by applying a relatively new algorithm known as shuffled frog leaping with modification for the determination of optimal sequence of operations. In order to validate the developed shuffled frog leaping algorithm with modification, it is applied on six different problems of holes and its obtained results are compared with dynamic programming (DP), ant colony algorithm (ACO), and immune based evolutionary approach (IA). In addition, an application example of injection mould is considered in this work to demonstrate the proposed approach. The result obtained by shuffled frog leaping algorithm with modification is compared with those obtained using ACO, particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and IA. It is observed that the results obtained by shuffled frog leaping algorithm with modification are superior to those obtained using ACO, PSO and IA for the application example presented.