Finding the Shortest Holes Drilling Path in Printed Circuit Board via the Dhouib-Matrix-4 Technique

摘要

The process of drilling holes in Printed Circuit Board presents a crucial issue and finding the shortest drilling path allows to minimize the movement of a robot arm in order to increase the productivity of the Computer Numerically Controlled Machine. In this paper, the novel metaheuristic Dhouib-Matrix-4 (DM4) is applied to find the shortest drilling tool path. DM4 is based on the combination of the novel constructive technique Dhouib-Matrix-TSP1 (DM-TSP1) and the original local search method Far-to-Near (FtN). Moreover, DM4 uses several differential statistical metrics in order to explore different regions in the domain space thanks to DM-TSP1 and exploits a specific region via FtN. The performance of the DM4 technique is evaluated against the Cuckoo Search, the Genetic Algorithm and the hybrid Cuckoo Search-Genetic Algorithm in finding the shortest drilling path for three standard problems.