A Cooperative Simulated Annealing Algorithm for the Optimization of Process Planning

Process planning is an essential component of computer aided process planning (CAPP), which involves operations selection from design features and operations sequencing of these selected operations. It makes process planning a complex combinatorial optimization problem to conduct of these two steps simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a cooperative simulated annealing (CoSA) approach for the process planning problem to minimize total manufacturing cost. The proposed CoSA algorithm employed a novel optimization strategy different from all the existing approaches in the literature. Simulated annealing was utilized to optimize the four components of a process plan individually and sequentially. The approach is tested on two parts from the literature and compared with other approaches. The computation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.