A genetic algorithm of determining cycle time for printed circuit board assembly lines

The problem of allocating components to a printed circuit board assembly line, which has several non-identical placement machines in series, is formulated as a minimax-type integer programming (IP) model in this paper. In order to achieve the best production throughput, the objective of the model is to minimize the cycle time of the assembly line. The IP model is proven to be NP-complete (non-deterministic polynomial), so a genetic algorithm is developed for the cycle time determination problem in this paper. Finally, the efficiency of the genetic algorithm is illustrated by a numerical example.