Application of intelligent water drop algorithm in process planning optimization

Computer-aided process planning is an important part of computer integrated manufacturing, which is associated with computer-aided manufacturing and computer-aided design. This paper presents a process planning method based on the Intelligent Water Drop (IWD) algorithm. First, the operation units were defined by analyzing the machining features and analyzing the constraint relationship according to the processing characteristics of the operation unit as a constraint for process optimization. Then, the IWD algorithm was combined with the process planning problem. According to the iterative characteristics of the algorithm, the nodes in the flow path of the water droplets were associated with the operation units, and the amount of soil in the water droplets was correlated with the production cost. The mathematical model of process planning was constructed on the premise of analyzing the optimization objectives and machining constraints. By searching the feasible solution space limited by the sequential constraint matrix, the process planning scheme with the least production cost was obtained. Finally, an experiment of two prismatic parts was used to illustrate the application process of the IWD algorithm in process planning, and the calculation results were compared with other methods. The comparison results showed that the proposed method is feasible and effective in process planning.