A multicriteria simulation optimization method for injection molding

Injection molding is the most important process for mass-producing plastic products. To help improve and facilitate the molding of plastic parts, advanced computer simulation tools have been developed. While modeling is complicated by itself, the difficulty of optimizing the injection molding process is that the performance measures involving the injection molding process usually show conflicting behaviors. Therefore, the best solution for one performance measure is usually not the best in some other performance measures. This paper introduces a simulation optimization method which considers multiple performance measures and is able to find a set of efficient solutions without having to evaluate a large number of simulations. The main components of the method are metamodeling, design of experiments, and data envelopment analysis. The method is illustrated and detailed here using a simple test example, and it is applied to a real injection molding case. The performance of the method using a different design of experiments is also discussed.