OPTIMAL ROBOTIC COMPONENT PLACEMENT

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.