Allocation of component types to machines in the automated assembly of printed circuit boards

Duman, Ekrem (Dogus Author) -- An earlier version of this paper which has been presented at ISCIS'06: The 21st International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences, November 1-3, 2006 Istanbul, Turkey, has been published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science [18].Although the use of electronic component placement machines has brought reliability and speed to the printed circuit board (PCB) assembly process, to get higher utilization, one needs to solve the resulting complex operations research problems efficiently. In this study, the problem of distributing the assembly workload to two machines deployed on an assembly line with two identical component placement machines to minimize the line idle time is considered. This problem is NP-Complete even in its simplest form. A mathematical model and several heuristics have been proposed to solve this problem efficiently