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Grouping PCB Assembly Jobs with Typed Component Feeder Units

Timo Knuutila, Mika Hirvikorpi, Mika Johnsson, Olli Nevalainen, Grouping PCB Assembly Jobs with Typed Component Feeder Units. TUCS Technical Reports 460, Turku Centre for Computer Science, 2002.

Abstract:

We consider in this work an automatic assembly line for installing
electronic components on a bare printed circuit board (PCB), where each
production task, job, consists of a batch of identical PCBs. A job typically
requires the arranging of the components in a single production machine
(i.e. a PCB placement machine). When we switch from one job to another,
we must add the components (or replace existing components) that are
lacking from the component set of the next job. The job grouping problem is
to minimize the number of such rearrangements for a given set of jobs. This
is achieved by utilizing the full capacity of the feeder unit of the production
machine and storing all the components required by a job group
simultaneously.

In this work we generalize the aforementioned classic grouping problem in
such a way, that we allow the components to be of different types e.g.
paper-tape, tray, stick-feeder) and that the same flexible production
machine has some specific capacity for each such type. In this typed job
grouping problem (TJGP), where the feeder units and components have
types, we aim to minimize the number of rearrangements when the feeder
setup is constrained also by the type information. We would like to
emphasize that this generalization has become relevant in current practise,
because there are modern PCB placement machines with a few (typically
three) specialized types of component feeder units.

We first develope a mathematical formulation for the TJGP and show that
moderately large problem instances can be solved optimally using exact
solution algorithms. After this we propose and compare a number of different
heuristics for the problem.

BibTeX entry:

@TECHREPORT{tKnHiJoNe02a,
  title = {Grouping PCB Assembly Jobs with Typed Component Feeder Units},
  author = {Knuutila, Timo and Hirvikorpi, Mika and Johnsson, Mika and Nevalainen, Olli},
  number = {460},
  series = {TUCS Technical Reports},
  publisher = {Turku Centre for Computer Science},
  year = {2002},
}

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

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