The present manufacturing industry requires producing a large variety of complex components in small batch sizes and in a cost effective manner. At the same time the number of cutting tools per machining setup has increased, particularly in automated machining centres. Many strategies have been designed to solve the tool selection problem, and many tool replacement strategies have been proposed in the past. These strategies have been addressed separately, but a comprehensive algorithm is needed to properly select tools from the tools available in the tool library to perform operations and replace tools in the event of failure/wear. From the perspective of computer memory management strategies, this paper proposes four tool selection strategies and studies their performance with various tool replacement strategies. The effects of important parameters have been considered, such as reduction of tool life due to regrinding, limited number of regrinds, catastrophic failures, etc. The cost has been calculated for each combination of tool selection and replacement strategy. Similarly, the number of machine downtimes has been calculated in each case. The results show that the combination of various selection strategies and appropriate replacement strategies will affect the total cost.
