Process planning of a component placement machine in printed circuit board assembly

Abstract

In this thesis, we consider optimization problems arising in the PCB manufacturing industry using component placement machines. First, given a component placement machine having single head, a PCB and components to assemble the PCB, we consider the problem of determining the allocation of component feeders and the mounting sequence of components while minimizing the PCB assembly time. We present a quadratic mixed integer programming model for the problem. And, we decompose the original problem into an assignment problem and an asymmetric traveling salesman problem, based on the analysis of the pick-and-mount operation in the machine. Furthermore, we propose a solution procedure to the overall problem using heuristics to solve the subproblems. Second, given a component placement machine having multiple heads, a PCB and components to assemble the PCB, we consider the same problem as the case of the single-head machine. In the case of the machine with multiple heads, some different technological configurations of the machine make the problem more complicated, compared to the single-head machine. We decompose the problem into five subproblems; feeder grouping problem, head allocation problem, location clustering problem, feeder allocation problem and mounting sequence problem. For each subproblem, we develop a mathematical formulation and a solution approach based on the analysis of the problem. Moreover, we propose an overall solution approach to the original problem, incorporating the methods to solve the subproblems recursively. Finally, given a component placement machine, several types of PCBs and a number of component feeders used to assemble the PCBs, we consider the problem of determining the PCB group with the objective of minimizing setup time of component feeders. We develop a column generation approach to find an optimal solution to the problem. In this approach, we decompose the original problem into master problem and column generation subproblem. Sta...