An Efficient and Cost-Saving Component Scheduling Algorithm Using High Speed Turret Type Machines for a Board Containing Multiple PCBs

Abstract

This paper considers a material constrained component scheduling problem during the high speed surface mount manufacturing stage in printed circuit board (PCB) assembly, where each piece of board contains an even number of identical PCBs. To accomplish the production, material requirements must be predetermined and incorporated as restraints into the scheduling problem, which has the objective of minimizing production completion time (makespan). A solution procedure is developed based on the following strategies: 1) Each machine is responsible for the same PCBs of each piece, 2) Components of the same types may use one or more feeder locations, 3) Component types are clustered based on their suitable placement speeds, 4) A heuristic using a bottom-up approach is applied to determine the component placement sequence and the feeder location assignment for all machines. Velocity estimate functions of the turret, XY table, and feeder carriage were derived based on empirical data. An experiment using Fuji CP732E machines was conducted on two real life instances. Experimental results indicate that our method performs 32.96% and 10.60% better than the Fuji-CP software for the two instances, in terms of the makespan per piece of board.