Minimizing machine set-up time when manufacturing printed circuit boards.

Abstract

Technical advances in the past decade have enabled the development of very fast but expensive component placement machines for the production of Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs). However, when these fast machines have to assemble small volumes of many different types of circuit boards, the machine set-up time becomes much more important than the assembly rate of each board. In order to minimize this set up time, we must try to solve the set-up/sequencing decision problem according to either the MCS (Minimizing Component Switches) or MSI (Minimizing Switching Instants) performance criterion, or both. We examine the set-up/sequencing decision problem for a single machine (work cell) which has high mix low volume production schedules. We compare and improve methods which attempt to solve this problem, and we develop our own heuristics for solving this problem when both performance criteria are of great importance. We use lower bounds to determine how good our results are, and we discuss how to adapt methods which we have looked at to different manufacturing environments.