• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.1183-1192
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• 1993

Since the punching time is strongly related to the productivity in sheet metal stamping, there have been a lot of efforts to obtain the optimal tool path. However, most of the conventional efforts have the basic limitations to provide the global optimal solution because of the inherent difficulties of the NP hard combinatorial optimization problem. The existing methods search the optimal tool path with limiting tool changes to the minimal number, which proves not to be a global optimal solution. In this work, the turret rotation time is also considered in addition to the bed translation time of the NCT machine, and the total punching time is minimized by the simulated annealing algorithm. Some manufacturing constraints in punching sequences such as punching priority constraint and punching accuracy constraint are incorporated automatically in optimization, while several user-interactions to edit the final tool path are usually required in commercial systems.