Abstract:
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.