Abstract
Optimization of drill path can lead to significant reduction in machining time which directly improves productivity of manufacturing systems. In a batch production of a large number of items to be drilled such as printed circuit boards (PCB), the travel time of the drilling device is a significant portion of the overall manufacturing process. To increase PCB manufacturing productivity and to reduce production costs, a good option is to minimize the drill path route using an optimization algorithm. This paper reports a combinatorial cuckoo search algorithm for solving drill path optimization problem. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested and verified with three case studies from the literature. The computational experience conducted in this research indicates that the proposed algorithm is capable of efficiently finding the optimal path for PCB holes drilling process.
Highlights
IntroductionHole-drilling operation is almost always unavoidable. In particular in electronic manufacturing, drilling holes on the printed circuit board (PCB) is one of the most crucial processes
In the manufacturing industry, hole-drilling operation is almost always unavoidable
This paper reports a combinatorial cuckoo search algorithm for solving drill path optimization problem
Summary
Hole-drilling operation is almost always unavoidable. In particular in electronic manufacturing, drilling holes on the printed circuit board (PCB) is one of the most crucial processes. Due to the significant amount of time required for moving the drill bit from one point to another, holes drill routing optimization problem attracts a great interest among the academicians, researchers, and engineers to solve it This concern for calculation of the minimum tool path length between holes (the drilling device has to be steered to the location of each hole exactly once) is similar to a very wellknown problem from the operational research field called the (symmetric, single objective, and Euclidean) traveling salesman problem (TSP). Medina-Rodrıguez et al [25] presented a parallel ant colony optimization algorithm to find an efficient sequence of operation for a set of holes located in a PCB board that achieves the shortest tool path. Saealal et al [10] implemented ant colony system for PCB holes drilling route optimization problem with an objective to minimize the distance of the route chosen by the CNC machine.
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