Mathematical model and algorithm of toolpath optimisation on aircraft structural parts

Abstract

An intelligent toolpath (processing sequence) planning for fabricating aircraft structural parts is developed to obtain a minimum-length toolpath while maintaining the required machining time. The problem is first solved in the following ways. Firstly, an abstraction of the machining process is proposed to pick up the feed/retract points of each feature to be machined as the toolpath calculation basis. Secondly, the chaotic simulated annealing method is improved through storing the optimal solution, adding the control condition and selecting each parameter reasonably during the iteration of the algorithm so as to enhance its performance. What’s more, three solution-generating methods are used chaotically to obtain a better result. Lastly, the verification is conducted on four different aircraft structural parts, and the results prove that the proposed algorithm performs very well in terms of toolpath quality and computation time.

Keywords:

• aircraft structural parts
• chaotic simulated annealing
• toolpath

Acknowledgements

This work presented in this paper has been supported by grants from the National Science and Technology Major Project of China (NSTMP, No. 2012ZX04010051) and Shenyang Aircraft Industry (Group) Corporation Ltd.