An increasingly common feature of manufacturing companies is the use o
f robotic component placement machines in the assembly of electrical g
oods. These machines place electronic components at predefined positio
ns on printed circuit boards. A robotic arm, which carries one compone
nt at a time, collects components from feeders and places them, under
computer control, onto the printed circuit board. Using examples provi
ded by a major New Zealand manufacturer, we investigated the problem o
f assigning component reels to feeder positions and then constructing
efficient placement sequences for such a robotic placement machine. An
integer programming formulation is developed for this problem that, u
nlike previous solution techniques in the literature, can produce solu
tions which provably minimize total placement time for all company sup
plied sample problems. This solution method generates solutions approx
imately 10% better than those generated manually by the manufacturer's
engineers.