**1. Introduction**

Production engineering is a broad term covering many activities involved in the production life cycle of industrial products. The term itself is interchangeably used with manufacturing engineering as manufacturing is the backbone of production engineering.

There have been many developments in the domain of production engineering in recent years as reported in the literature. These include developments of new methods in production methods and systems and optimization for improving productivity or maximizing profit. For example, drilling as the most used production process is still the subject of study for improvement by contemporary researchers, and many of these works can be found in the literature [1–8]. There are also reports on the improvements of conventional and nonconventional production processes [9–11], optimization of processes [6, 12, 13], and enhancement of properties [14]. In addition, there are many reports in the literature on the development of production systems including quality control, process planning, and production planning and control systems [15–23].
