본 연구에서는 다음과 같은 두가지 관점에서 공구경로 최적화를 위한 기존 방 법의 문제점을 검토하고 이의 개선 방안을 제시하였다. 첫째, 기존의 공구경로 산출 방법에서는 고려되지 않는 공구대의 공구 장착 현황(turret configuration)이 최적화 과정에서 고려되어야 한다. 둘째로, 제작과 관련한 구속조건(manufacturing con- straints)이 최적화 과정에 직접 반영되어야 한다.
Since the punching time is strongly related to the productivity in sheet metal stamping, there have been a lot of efforts to obtain the optimal tool path. However, most of the conventional efforts have the basic limitations to provide the global optimal solution because of the inherent difficulties of the NP hard combinatorial optimization problem. The existing methods search the optimal tool path with limiting tool changes to the minimal number, which proves not to be a global optimal solution. In this work, the turret rotation time is also considered in addition to the bed translation time of the NCT machine, and the total punching time is minimized by the simulated annealing algorithm. Some manufacturing constraints in punching sequences such as punching priority constraint and punching accuracy constraint are incorporated automatically in optimization, while several user-interactions to edit the final tool path are usually required in commercial systems.
