Integrating Taguchi Method and Support Vector Machine for Enhanced Surface Roughness Modeling and Optimization

End milling process is widely used in various industrial applications, including health, aerospace and manufacturing industries. Over the years, machine technology of end milling has grown exponentially to attain the needs of various fields especially in manufacturing industry. The main concern of manufacturing industry is to obtain good quality products. The machined products quality is commonly correlated with the value of surface roughness (Ra), representing vital aspect that can influence overall machining performance. However, finding the optimal value of surface roughness is remain as a challenging task because it involves a lot of considerations on the cutting process especially the selection of suitable machining parameters and also cutting materials and workpiece. Hence, this study presents a support vector machine (SVM) prediction model to obtain the minimum Ra for end milling machining process. The prediction model was developed with three input parameters, namely feed rate, depth of cut and spindle speed, while Ra is the output parameter. The data of end milling is collected from the case studies based on the machining experimental with titanium alloy, workpiece and three types of cutting tools, namely uncoated carbide WC-Co (uncoated), common PVD-TiAlN (TiAlN) and Supernitride coating (SNTR). The prediction result has found that SVM is an effective prediction model by giving a better Ra value compared with experimental and regression results.