A hybrid intelligence technique based on the Taguchi method for multi-objective process parameter optimization of the 3D additive screen printing of athletic shoes

Abstract

This paper presents a hybrid intelligence technique based on the Taguchi method for multi-objective process parameter optimization of 3D additive screen printing of athletic shoes. 3D additive screen printing is mainly used in the high-end athletic shoes and clothes field. It requires overlapping and overprinting dozens of times to make the printed patterns stereoscopic. The process of 3D additive screen printing is complex and variable and the production cycle is long. Because of the variability of the screen printing process and the coupling between process parameters, there is no simple method to guide the trial production of new products and obtain the optimal process parameters of screen printing. Trial-and-error is often used but it expends a lot of manpower, materials, and financial resources. To solve the optimization problem, a Taguchi experiment based on fuzzy comprehensive evaluation with five factors and two responses was first designed. Then, a back-propagation network (BPN), least-squares support-vector machine (LSSVM), and random forest (RF) were trained with experimental data to obtain a forecasting model for the process parameters. On comparison, the RF forecasting model performed best in this case. Then, the multi-objective antlion optimizer (MOALO), which is a new multi-objective optimization algorithm with excellent performance, was improved to the IMOALO, and it was proved that IMOALO has a better performance than MOALO. Combining the RF forecasting model with IMOALO, and carrying out the optimization, the optimal process parameters were obtained. Actual printing production shows that the proposed hybrid intelligence technique improves the production efficiency and first pass yield of printed products.