Multi-objective and many objective design of plastic injection molding process

Plastic injection molding is one of the most used manufacturing processes capable of producing flexible and economical parts at a large scale. Since this is a highly complex process, it is a natural consequence that there are many conflicting objectives that are worth considering in the design of such process. Problems where more than three objectives are being considered at the same time are termed many objective problems (MaOPs) in literature. Unlike for multi-objective problems (MOPs, problems with two or three objectives), there is no consensus of how to find ideal solutions for general MaOPs. In this paper, the multi-objective and many objective design of a plastic injection molding process is addressed. To accomplish this task, the two main contributions of this work are as follows: first, a new optimization model that contains up to seven objectives is proposed. That is, for the first time, it is considered the many objective design of a plastic injection process. Second, the usefulness of the Pareto Explorer, a global/local exploration tool for MaOPs, in the current context is demonstrated. For this, the complete seven-objective optimization problem on several selected scenarios related to the hypothetical decision making of a plastic gear is considered.