A heuristic for component switching on Surface Mount Technology (SMT) placement machines

In this paper a heuristic solution procedure is developed to deal with the component switching problem, which arises in printed circuit board assembly. In the first stage of the recursive heuristic, we determine the component set-up for a given sequence of board types to be processed on a single placement machine by applying a modification of the so-called ‘keep component needed soonest’ policy. In the second stage, component feeders are assigned to slots in the magazine of the placement machine. Recursions to the first stage allow feasible solutions to be generated very fast for all instances of the numerical experiments. These solutions differ only slightly from those obtained for the relaxed problem for which the assignment restrictions are omitted.