An optimization model for energy-efficient machining for sustainable production

Abstract

Sustainable production plays an important role in product lifecycle management by considering the social sustainability. Energy-efficient machining is an efficient approach for sustainable production in current manufacturing sectors. Although many related efforts have been achieved, a comprehensive energy optimization approach oriented to manufacturing parts is still a challenge. Therefore, this paper selects Standard for the Exchange of Product model data-Numerical Control (STEP-NC) as the enabling technology to achieve energy-efficient machining. An optimization model is proposed based on the energy calculation method using the workingstep in STEP-NC. An improved ant colony optimization (ACO) solution, consisting of encoding and decoding, initialization, machining scheme generation, idea of local multiple iteration, evaluation, pheromone evaporation and update, is presented. A part with typical manufacturing features is applied to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The generated solution can provide a comprehensive machining scheme for low energy demandI by improving the efficiency with 25% for solving the optimization problem.