Optimal Selection of Machining Parameters in Multi-Tool Drilling

Drilling accounts for a large proportion of machining operations for many industrial products such as dies and moulds. In this process, when the hole size to be drilled is large, one or more pilot holes have to be drilled before enlarging the hole with a final size drill. The paper presents a procedure to optimize the machining parameters based on a recently developed global optimization technique called scatter search. The total production cost is minimized subjected to the machine tool constraints and technological requirements. Scatter search provides unifying principles for joining solutions based on generalized path constructions in both euctidean and neighborhood spaces and utilizes strategic designs where other approaches like genetic algorithms resort to randomization. In the literature, It is proved that scatter search can produce better results than genetic algorithms. A software program is developed in VC⁺⁺ to get the optimal machining parameters.