PROCESS PLAN OPTIMISATION FOR PLASTIC INJECTION MOULD BASE

摘要

As competition is stiffening in today's injection moulding industry, mould base companies are finding it more difficult to process plan their mould base products as extra machining (customisation) on their standard mould bases is often required by their customers. Considering this problem, this paper focuses on the current development of a computer-aided process planning (CAPP) system to concurrently optimise the process planning selections and sequences for mould bases. By considering multiple planning tasks such as operations, machine selections, machining directions and choice of cutting tools simultaneously, this system can generate the entire search space and combined with the geometric information generated from IMOLD~® before optimising the process plan based on the best available resources. A prototype process planner module based on a specially designed Genetic Algorithm (GA) approach has been developed. This has been proven to be capable of optimising the process plan for both standard and customised mould bases. The minimum total machining time has been proposed as the main objective. The implementation and performance of this planner has been illustrated by a case study. This program is expected to provide users with the ease of generating the best plan, together with a choice of other alternative feasible plans.