Intelligent Process Planning for Competitive Engineering

Process planning is one of the key activities for product design and manufacturing. The impact of process plans on all phases of product design and manufacture requires high level of interaction of different activities and close integration of them into a coherent system. This paper presents a process model of product development with manufacturing approach based on intelligent process planning techniques with focus on optimal selection of manufacturing parameters. Some derivations of the computing model for analysis of machining conditions by optimal determination of the cutting parameters in multi-pass NC machining activities are made with implementation of new evolutionary computation techniques. Genetic Algorithm (GA) based optimization method and deterministic optimization method (DO) are developed and then implementations into real manufacturing process planning for new product developed are analyzed. The results showed that both the developed optimization methods (GA and DO), especially GA, are effective methods for solving multi-objective optimization problems during the manufacturing process planning and cutting parameters selection.