Determination of the Pareto-optimal build orientations in Stereolithography

The selection of build orientation for a given part is one of the most important tasks encountered in the process planning phase of Layer Manufacturing in general and Stereolithography in particular. The orientation selection is by definition a multi-criteria optimization problem in which the operator seeks to achieve the optimum trade-off between cost and quality depending on the given fabrication constraints and requirements. In the present work a solution approach that focuses on the determination of the set of Pareto-optimal orientations is examined. Pareto-optimal orientations could be considered as a set of good choices for the selection of the optimum orientation for both single part and multiple (batch) fabrication. For the construction of this set in a time-efficient manner a Genetic Algorithm is employed. In order to investigate the efficiency of the proposed approach a case study is examined and the corresponding results are presented.