Research And Development On Molding-Sintering Production Planning Software Of Sintering NdFeB Based On Heuristic Rules

NdFeB material is high-end rare earth material, which can be divided into sintered-NdFeB and bonded-NdFeB according to the production process.The sintered-NdFeB has a wide range of applications for its excellent magnetic performance. Molding-sintering process is the core process to produce the sintered-NdFeB. Molding-sintering planning is to arrange each day’s production of the orders and the production quantity of the sintering furnace, considering order demanding,sintering equipment capacity operating group capacity,powder inventory,every day’s quantity of sintering-furnace,mold’s quantity in the specified period.The quality of molding-sintering planning will affect the efficiency of the entire production process. Because of the large number of orders, many disturbance factors of the planning(such as inserting and canceling orders),a lot of constraints, it is a heavy workload and difficult to get a good result by artificial planning.Thus, it is significant to develop the molding-sintering production planning software.In this paper,we have a deep research on the molding-sintering production planning from a NdFeB material production company. We not only summary the heuristic rules of the molding-sintering production planning but also develop the molding-sintering production planning software.The details are given as follows:(1)Analyze the research status of sintered-NdFeB molding-sintering production planning; introduce the production process of sintered-NdFeB; describe the artificial planning process of molding-sintering production planning and point out some drawbacks in artificial planning,such as limited considerations,heavy workload,serious orders’ tardiness and ignoring process coordination,and etc; and then analyze the complexity of molding-sintering production planning including randomness,many disturbance factors,multi-constraints,multi-targets,and etc.(2)Describe the problem of molding-sintering production planning,using the production of a order in a day and the production quantity of the sintering furnacea in a day as variables,and using minizining the sum of finished time penalty and maximizing the weighted sum of the quantity of sintering furnace as performance indexes,and using order demanded quantity,sintering equipment capacity,operating group capacity,powder inventory,every day’s quantity of sintering furnace and mold’s quantity as constraints.Based on a deep research,we summarize corresponding relationship between molding powder weight and sintering furnace rules,corresponding relationship among mold equipment-and operating group rules,the total capacity of the molding equipments rules,completion of the order’s demand rules.And further more, we take out priority-delivery time-demanded quantity rules,the max production of the order in a day rules and maximizing the small format equipment’s capacity rules;On the basis of the above seven kind rules we take a simulation experiment of molding-sintering production planning, and the result proves the validity of this method.(3)Design and develop molding-sintering production planning software including the designing and developing of functions、database and interfaces.Embed molding-sintering production planning software into the magnetic material production management system and apply it in the workshop.The actual application results indicate the validity of the software.