Optimal Path Planning for LPBF as an Equality Generalized Traveling Salesperson Problem
Please login to view abstract download link
Planning a laser path in Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) printers may benefit from being optimized to improve certain conditions for a print, such as minimizing a measure for the induced temperature gradients with the hope it is correlated with residual stresses, or increasing the overall time each part of a print remains hot to partially temper it. The simplest version of this problem discretizes the laser path as a sequence of tiles and aims to determine the order in which the tiles are to be heated by the laser. In this talk we show that the problem of determining an optimal tile ordering can be reduced to an Equality Generalized Traveling Salesperson Problem (E-GTSP), a reduction that opens the problem to be solved through commonly used heuristics. We then demonstrate the performance of this identification towards solving some simple LPBF path planning problems.