The simultaneous determination of the assignment of items to resources, the cycle times, and the reorder intervals in repetitive printed circuit board assembly

The planning and scheduling of repetitive PCB assembly is usually very complicated. In this paper, we propose a solution method for the simultaneous determination of the assignment of different PCB types to capacity constrained assembly lines, the assembly cycle times of the PCB types, and the reorder intervals of the required component types. This method takes the limited capacity into account as well as the component commonality of the PCB types. The solution method consists of two heuristics. The first heuristic determines the cycle times of the PCB types and the reorder intervals of the component types in order to minimise the sum of the set-up, holding, and ordering costs for given assignments. This method is used as a sub-algorithm in the second heuristic, a local search algorithm. The latter heuristic defines an assignment for which a local minimum of cost is achieved. A case study has been carried out in which the algorithm has been applied to real-life data. It appears that the present cost can be reduced by almost 38%.