Rg. Askin et al., PRINTED-CIRCUIT BOARD FAMILY GROUPING AND COMPONENT ALLOCATION FOR A MULTIMACHINE, OPEN-SHOP ASSEMBLY CELL, Naval research logistics, 41(5), 1994, pp. 587-608
Citations number
34
Categorie Soggetti
Operatione Research & Management Science","Operatione Research & Management Science","Engineering, Marine
This article considers a particular printed circuit board (PCB) assemb
ly system employing surface mount technology. Multiple, identical auto
matic placement machines, a variety of board types, and a large number
of component types characterize the environment studied. The problem
addressed is that of minimizing the makespan for assembling a batch of
boards with a secondary objective of reducing the mean flow time. The
approach adopted is that of grouping boards into production families,
allocating component types to placement machines for each family, div
iding of families into board groups with similar processing times, and
the scheduling of groups. A complete setup is incurred only when chan
ging over between board families. For the environment studied, precede
nce constraints on the order of component placement do not exist, and
placement times are independent of feeder location. Heuristic solution
procedures are proposed to create board subfamilies (groups) for whic
h the component mounting times are nearly identical within a subfamily
. Assignment of the same component type to multiple machines is avoide
d. The procedures use results from the theory of open-shop scheduling
and parallel processor scheduling to sequence boards on machines. Note
that we do not impose an open-shop environment but rather model the p
roblem in the context of an open shop, because the order of component
mountings is immaterial. Three procedures are proposed for allocating
components to machines and subsequently scheduling boards on the machi
nes. The first two procedures assign components to machines to balance
total work load. For scheduling purposes, the first method groups boa
rds into subfamilies to adhere to the assumptions of the open-shop mod
el, and the second procedure assumes that each board is a subfamily an
d these are scheduled in order of shortest total processing time. The
third procedure starts by forming board subfamilies based on total com
ponent similarity and then assigns components to validate the open-sho
p model. We compare the performance of the three procedures using esti
mated daily, two-day, and weekly production requirements by averaging
quarterly production data for an actual cell consisting of five decoup
led machines. (C) 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.