A GENETIC ALGORITHM FOR A SINGLE HOIST SCHEDULING IN THE PRINTED-CIRCUIT-BOARD ELECTROPLATING LINE

In this paper, the problem of determining cyclic schedules for a mater ial handling hoist in the printed-circuit-board(PCB) electroplating li ne is considered. The objective of this research is to determine an op timal simple-cycle schedule of the hoist which in turn maximizes the l ine throughput rate. Previous approaches to the cyclic hoist schedulin g problem are all mathematical programming-based approaches to develop cyclic schedules (Mixed integer Programming, Linear Programming based Branch and Bound, Branch and Bound Search Method and so on). In this paper, a genetic algorithm-based approach for a single hoist schedulin g in the PCB electroplating line is described. Through an experiment f or the well known example data, the proposed algorithm is shown to be more efficient than the previous mathematical programming-based algori thm. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.