Evolutionary techniques in optimizing machining parameters: review and recent applications (2007-2011)

In highly competitive manufacturing industries nowadays, the manufactures ultimate goals are to produce high quality product with less cost and time constraints. To achieve these goals, one of the considerations is by optimizing the machining process parameters such as the cutting speed, depth of cut, radial rake angle. Recently, alternative to conventional techniques, evolutionary optimization techniques are the new trend for optimization of the machining process parameters. This paper gives an overview and the comparison of the latest five year researches from 2007 to 2011 that used evolutionary optimization techniques to optimize machining process parameter of both traditional and modern machining. Five techniques are considered, namely genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), ant colony optimization (ACO) and artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm. Literature found that GA was widely applied by researchers to optimize the machining process parameters. Multi-pass turning was the largest machining operation that deals with GA optimization. In terms of machining performance, surface roughness was mostly studied with GA, SA, PSO, ACO and ABC evolutionary techniques