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Grouping PCB Assembly Jobs with Feeders of Several Types

Timo Knuutila, Mika Hirvikorpi, Mika Johnsson, Olli Nevalainen, Grouping PCB Assembly Jobs with Feeders of Several Types. Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems 16(2), 2004.

Abstract:

A variant of the classical job grouping problem (JGP) in printed circuit
board (PCB) assembly is considered. Studies on JGPs have assumed a
single feeder from which the components are retrieved and then placed
on the PCB. Recent advances in technology have made it possible to use
several different kinds (types) of feeders at the same time.
In a JGP, the aim is to group the PCBs so that the cardinality of the
grouping is minimal and each group can be processed without rearranging
the contents of the feeder. In the job grouping problem with several feeder
types (JGP-T) the goal is the same but instead of one linear feeder we
have several feeders and each component is associated with a given feeder
type which restricts its placement.
We give a mathematical formulation for the JGP-T and show that it is
hard to solve to optimality for problems of practical size. The connections
of JGP-T to known problems are discussed. We also propose several
efficient heuristics and compare their results against optimal solutions.

BibTeX entry:

@ARTICLE{jKnHiJoNe04a,
  title = {Grouping PCB Assembly Jobs with Feeders of Several Types},
  author = {Knuutila, Timo and Hirvikorpi, Mika and Johnsson, Mika and Nevalainen, Olli},
  journal = {Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems},
  volume = {16},
  number = {2},
  year = {2004},
}

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

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