FIXTURE LAYOUT OPTIMIZATION BASED ON SOCIAL RADIATION ALGORITHM

摘要

Sheet metal parts easily deformed during clamping and welding, and fixture layout design is very difficult because it takes a long time to calculate and read displacements of all nodes. This paper proposes a method to optimize fixture scheme by a social radiation algorithm (SRA). Firstly unfeasible candidate nodes are eliminated by some rules according to manufacturing experiences. Afterwards some feasible zones are optimized by SRA. Finally the best fixture layout is obtained through selecting the feasible nodes among the optimal zones. A case study of guiding gutter is used to illustrate the proposed method, and the results show that the social radiation algorithm has better efficiency and higher accuracy than the genetic algorithm.