Tool Path Length Optimization in Drilling Operations: A Comparative Study

Drilling is the most common operation in the manufacture of machined parts. The complexity of this process depends on the number of holes to be machined which can reach hundreds or even thousands for certain parts. Also, the geometrical distribution of holes may or may not be regular, on a single plane or on several. Therefore, optimizing tool paths in multi-hole drilling operations can reduce time, cost, and energy consumption. Hence, several optimization methods were used to solve this issue. The objective of this research is to prove the performance of the novel optimization concept Dhouib-Matrix (DM) to find the shortest drilling tool path and thus improve productivity. In this vein, DM and its derivatives such as ABC-DM-TSP1, DM3, and A-DM3 have been applied to several case studies of the regular rectangular and circular array of holes. To evaluate the performance of DM, a comparative study with several optimization algorithms commonly used in the literature is conducted in this article. To this end, data set from 13 case studies have been experimented to compare the three derivatives of DM and eleven well-known optimization methods, mainly genetic algorithm, ant colony optimization, artificial bee colony, etc. Computational results indicate that the derivatives of DM outperform all studied competing metaheuristics, and yielded in some cases improvements exceeding 100% in tool path length.