In rapid prototyping contour scanning process, to reduce the spare travel time, a mathematical model which has considered the minimal time distance is established. The situation that the starting point is different from the end point is analyzed. In the improved genetic-ant algorithm, the dual integer coding is adopted to optimize the contour scanning order and starting point of contour simultaneously, we adopt genetic algorithm to produce initialization pheromone, and realize the fusion of ant

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... colony algorithm and genetic algorithm. In the hybrid algorithm, the new state transition rule is adopted, dynamic volatile coefficient is adopted for pheromone updating, the pheromone and elicitation information are used to choose crossover and mutation positions. The computation result shows that the algorithm can optimize the rapid prototyping contour path effectively.