| Article ID: | iaor19911532 |
| Country: | Switzerland |
| Volume: | 26 |
| Start Page Number: | 455 |
| End Page Number: | 480 |
| Publication Date: | Dec 1990 |
| Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
| Authors: | Crama Y., Kolen A.W.J., Oerlemans A.G., Spieksma F.C.R. |
The electronics industry relies heavily on numerically controlled machines for the placement of electronic components on the surface of printed circuit boards (PCB). This paper proposes a heuristic hierarchical approach to the problem of optimizing the throughput rate of a line of several of such machines, devoted to the assembly of a single type of PCB. A number of well-known NP-hard problems emerge, for which mathematical models and heuristic solution methods are developed. The approach is tested on a real-life problem, for which it is shown to perform well.