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Minimizing the Number of Pickups on a Multi-Head Placement Machine

Timo Knuutila, Sami Pyöttiälä, Olli S. Nevalainen, Minimizing the Number of Pickups on a Multi-Head Placement Machine. Journal of the Operational Research Society 58(1), 115–121, 2007.

Abstract:

Multi-head gantry machines are becoming increasingly popular in surface mount technology (SMT), because they
combine high printing speed with a moderate price. The optimization of their operation seems, however, to be very
difficult. We formalize here a small subproblem of the scheduling problem of multi-headed SMT machines, namely the
selection of nozzles which pick up and place components on printed circuit boards (PCB). The aim in this selection is to
minimize the number of component pickups when manufacturing some PCB type. Given a sequence of component
placement commands, a greedy nozzle usage policy picks, at each pickup, as many components next in the sequence as
possible. If the nozzles are ‘universal’, that is, they can pick up any component, it is obvious that this policy is optimal.
The situation gets more complicated once certain component types can be picked up only with certain nozzle types. We
show that the greedy policy is optimal in this case, too. Finally, we do some experiments aimed at a better understanding
of this subproblem.

BibTeX entry:

@ARTICLE{jKnPyNe07a,
  title = {Minimizing the Number of Pickups on a Multi-Head Placement Machine},
  author = {Knuutila, Timo and Pyöttiälä, Sami and Nevalainen, Olli S.},
  journal = {Journal of the Operational Research Society},
  volume = {58},
  number = {1},
  publisher = {Palgrave Macmillan},
  pages = {115–121},
  year = {2007},
}

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

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