Extraction Fuzzy Linguistic Rules from Neural Networks for Maximizing Tool Life in High-speed Milling Process

Abstract

In metal cutting industry it is a common practice to search for optimal combination of cutting parameters in order to maximize the tool life for a fixed minimum value of material removal rate(MRR). After the advent of high-speed milling(HSM) process, lots of experimental and theoretical researches have been done for this purpose which mainly emphasized on the optimization of the cutting parameters. It is highly beneficial to convert raw data into a comprehensive knowledge-based expert system using fuzzy logic as the reasoning mechanism. In this paper an attempt has been presented for the extraction of the rules from fuzzy neural network(FNN) so as to have the most effective knowledge-base for given set of data. Experiments were conducted to determine the best values of cutting speeds that can maximize tool life for different combinations of input parameters. A fuzzy neural network was constructed based on the fuzzification of input parameters and the cutting speed. After training process, raw rule sets were extracted and a rule pruning approach was proposed to obtain concise linguistic rules. The estimation process with fuzzy inference showed that the optimized combination of fuzzy rules provided the estimation error of only 6.34 m/min as compared to 314 m/min of that of randomized combination of rules.