The cooling system of an injection mould is very important to the productivity of the injection moulding process and the quality of the
moulded part. Despite the various research efforts that have been directed towards the analysis, optimization, and fabrication of cooling systems,
support for the layout design of the cooling system has not been well developed. In the layout design phase, a major concern is the feasibility
of building the cooling system inside the mould insert without interfering with the other mould components. This paper reports a configuration
space (C-space) method to address this important issue. While a high-dimensional C-space is generally required to deal with a complex system
such as a cooling system, the special characteristics of cooling system design are exploited in the present study, and special techniques that allow
C-space computation and storage in three-dimensional or lower dimension are developed. This new method is an improvement on the heuristic
method developed previously by the authors, because the C-space representation enables an automatic layout design system to conduct a more
systematic search among all of the feasible designs. A simple genetic algorithm is implemented and integrated with the C-space representation to
automatically generate candidate layout designs. Design examples generated by the genetic algorithm are given to demonstrate the feasibility of
the method.
