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A Critical Review of Multi-hole Drilling Path Optimization

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Abstract

Hole drilling is one of the major basic operations in part manufacturing. It follows without surprise then that the optimization of this process is of great importance when trying to minimize the total financial and environmental cost of part manufacturing. In multi-hole drilling, 70% of the total process time is spent in tool movement and tool switching. Therefore, toolpath optimization in particular has attracted significant attention in cost minimization. This paper critically reviews research publications on drilling path optimization. In particular, this review focuses on three aspects; problem modeling, objective functions, and optimization algorithms. We conclude that most papers being published on hole drilling are simply basic Traveling Salesman Problems (TSP) for which extremely powerful heuristics exist and for which source code is readily available. Therefore, it is remarkable that many researchers continue developing “novel” metaheuristics for hole drilling without properly situating those approaches in the larger TSP literature. Consequently, more challenging hole drilling applications that are modeled by the Precedence Constrained TSP or hole drilling with sequence dependent drilling times do not receive much research focus. Sadly, these many low quality hole drilling research publications drown out the occasional high quality papers that describe specific problematic problem constraints or objective functions. It is our hope through this review paper that researchers’ efforts can be refocused on these problem aspects in order to minimize production costs in the general sense.

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Notes

  1. Abidin, Ab Rashid and Mohamed claim to review 61 papers on hole drilling path optimization, but going in detail over those publications, we were only able to identify 41 papers that deal with path optimization. More specifically, using the reference numbers of the paper of Abidin, Ab Rashid and Mohamed [8], [52] was omitted because of very poor quality and content, [60] described state of the art in optimization for maintenance system, [14, 15, 19, 21,22,23, 41, 42, 45, 62,63,64,65,66,67] are general descriptions of metaheuristics not specifically applied to hole drilling, [51] was counted twice, and [5] deals with optimization of process parameters.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 300A, 3001, Heverlee, Belgium

    Reginald Dewil, Corrinne Luteyn & Dirk Cattrysse

  2. Faculty of Engineering, Industrial Engineering Department, Uludag University, Gorukle Campus, 16059, Bursa, Turkey

    İlker Küçükoğlu

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  1. Reginald Dewil
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Correspondence to Reginald Dewil.

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Dewil, R., Küçükoğlu, İ., Luteyn, C. et al. A Critical Review of Multi-hole Drilling Path Optimization. Arch Computat Methods Eng 26, 449–459 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11831-018-9251-x

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