DRL-Based Injection Molding Process Parameter Optimization for Adaptive and Profitable Production

Plastic injection molding remains essential to modern manufacturing. However, optimizing process parameters to balance product quality and profitability under dynamic environmental and economic conditions remains a persistent challenge. This study presents a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based framework for real-time process optimization in injection molding, integrating product quality and profitability into the control objective. A profit function was developed to reflect real-world manufacturing costs, incorporating resin, mold wear, and electricity prices, including time-of-use variations. Surrogate models were constructed to predict product quality and cycle time, enabling efficient offline training of DRL agents using soft actor-critic (SAC) and proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DRL framework can dynamically adapt to seasonal and operational variations, consistently maintaining product quality while maximizing profit. Compared to traditional optimization methods such as genetic algorithms, the DRL models achieved comparable economic performance with up to 135x faster inference speeds, making them well-suited for real-time applications. The framework's scalability and adaptability highlight its potential as a foundation for intelligent, data-driven decision-making in modern manufacturing environments.