Process planning belongs to one of the most essential functions of the modern manufacturing system. Moreover, flexible process planning implies the ability of a system to adapt to changing requirements and thereby provide alternative ways of performing manufacturing operations on a part. Variety of manufacturing resources including variety of alternative machines, alternative tools, as well as tool access direction (TAD) leads to the fact that most of the parts in modern manufacturing systems have various flexible process plans. Therefore, obtaining optimal process plan from all available alternatives has become a very important task in the domain of flexible process planning research. In this article, a method based on modified particle swarm optimisation (mPSO) has been developed to solve this nondeterministic polynomial-hard combinatorial optimisation problem, and the following issues have been addressed: (i) the AND/OR network representation has been adopted to describe various types of flexibility, i...
['Zoran Miljković', 'Milica Petrović']
Application of modified multi-objective particle swarm optimisation algorithm for flexible process planning problem