Multi-Speed Gearbox Design Using Swarm Intelligence

This paper presents the application of particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique and its variants to gearbox design problem. The gearbox design problem is a highly constrained, multi-objective optimization problem. PSO is one of the swarm intelligence (SI) techniques, which use the group intelligence behavior along with individual intelligence to solve the combinatorial optimization problem. In this work a multi-speed gearbox is designed for the HMT high speed lathe, LB-17, which is available in the Production Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology, Trichy. This work focuses on the design improvement of existing gearbox so as to increase the power output and to reduce the size, using non-traditional optimization techniques. This paper presents particle swarm optimization algorithm for finding the gearbox parameters with reasonable time.