Heuristics to improve the performance of a dual head placement machine

The process steps to assemble a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) include solder paste printing, component placement and soldering. Since the placement machine is the bottleneck, it is imperative to improve its performance to increase line throughput. Two important decisions which affect the cycle time are feeder assignment and placement sequence. A heuristic is proposed for the feeder assignment problem. The placement tours are determined by solving a TSP using the 2-opt heuristic and simulated annealing. Twelve PCBs from, real-life applications were chosen for experimentation. The proposed approach outperformed the machine software (in terms of cycle time) by as much as 11%.