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Improving the Pickups of Components on a Gantry-Type Placement Machine

Sami Pyöttiälä, Timo Knuutila, Olli S. Nevalainen, Improving the Pickups of Components on a Gantry-Type Placement Machine. In: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Group Technology / Cellular Manufacturing 2006 (GTCM2006), 382-391, 2006.

Abstract:

A multi-head gantry component placement machine has an arm which can hold several placement nozzles at a time. The different nozzle types are specialized to handle specific component types. The machine repeats cycles of four phases; component pick-up from feeders, arm movement above the circuit board, component placement to the printed circuit board, and arm movement back to the feeder unit. It is known that if the order of placements and the arm contents are fixed, the best strategy is to pick up at each cycle as many components as possible with the nozzles in the placement arm. The number of cycles depends therefore on the selection of nozzles chosen for the placement arm. In this paper we define the optimal nozzle selection problem (ONS) in which the task is to find such a selection of nozzles for a given placement job that minimizes the number of machine cycles. ONS can be solved with a brute force method but this is too heavy for problems of practical size. Three different heuristics are proposed. In addition to these, a local search that further improves the solutions of the heuristics is given. The algorithms turn out to find optimal or near optimal solutions in practical tests.

BibTeX entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{inpPyKnNe06a,
  title = {Improving the Pickups of Components on a Gantry-Type Placement Machine},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Group Technology / Cellular Manufacturing 2006 (GTCM2006)},
  author = {Pyöttiälä, Sami and Knuutila, Timo and Nevalainen, Olli S.},
  pages = {382-391},
  year = {2006},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): Algorithmics and Computational Intelligence Group (ACI)

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