Multi-piece Mold Design Based on Linear Mixed-Integer Program toward Guaranteed Optimality

Multi-piece molds are a type of molding technology, which consist of more than two mold pieces and are assembled/dissembled like a space puzzle. Based on such molds, complex parts can be made for limited run production. Compared to traditional two-piece molds, parts with much more complex geometries can be made, however, this also brings challenge in designing such multi-piece molds. Previous works to address the problem are all based on heuristics. In this paper, we present a multi-piece mold design framework based on linear mixed integer program. In our method, multi-piece mold design with guaranteed optimality on the number of mold pieces can be generated for any given CAD model of a molded part. The formulation of multi-piece mold design as a linear mixed-integer program is presented. The related multi-piece mold design framework is discussed. Some examples are provided which illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.