Evaluating evolutionary algorithms on spot welding sequence optimization with respect to geometrical variation

Spot welding is the prevalent joining process in the automotive industry. The spot welding sequence has a notable effect on the geometrical variation of the final assembly. Finding the optimal weld sequence for geometrical quality is a fast growing and NP-complete problem. Using exhaustive search for this purpose can be a time-consuming task. In this paper, genetic, particle swarm and ant colony optimization algorithms are applied to three industrial reference cases. The performance of these algorithms for finding the optimal sequence with respect to geometrical variation is compared considering the number of function evaluations