Evolutionary Optimization of Plastic Injection Mould Cooling System Layout Design

The cooling system is one of the most important systems in a plastic injection mould. It affects the quality and productivity of the molded part. In this paper, we extend our previous research on the automatic plastic injection cooling system layout design to multiple inlet and outlet systems, and propose an evolutionary approach with ad hoc operators to concurrently optimize the topological connection and geometric position of a cooling system. A mixed encoding scheme is developed to encode a candidate solution, which is represented in the form of a variant-length chromosome. Ad hoc evolutionary operators and parameters adapting to the characteristics of cooling system design are devised. An experimental system is implemented to verify the feasibility of the approach, and the results of case study illustrate the validity of this approach. It can be expected this research will well facilitate the automation of plastic injection mould cooling system design.