A COMPARISON OF SETUP STRATEGIES FOR PRINTED-CIRCUIT BOARD ASSEMBLY

This paper develops and tests a set of strategies for operating a sing le printed-circuit-board assembly machine. In particular, the paper ad dresses decisions associated with feeder changeover, placement sequenc ing, and board sequencing. Solution procedures are developed and imple mented for a variety of setup management strategies, including group a nd partial setup. These procedures are tested on a range of problems t o determine their relative performance under different production envi ronments. The procedure for group setup is shown to be applicable when component commonality is high and changeovers are time consuming. Par tial setup strategies, which focus on minimizing the total production time, are shown to adapt to changing production conditions and therefo re outperform the other setup strategies. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Lt d. All rights reserved.