Feeder Re-assign Problem in a Surface Mount Device with a Piano-Type Multi-Headed Gantry

Abstract

A surface mount device (SMD) assembles electronic components on printed circuit boards (PCB). Since a component assembly process is a bottleneck process in a PCB assembly line, making an efficient SMD plan is critical in increasing the PCB assembly line productivity. Feeder assignment is an important part of the SMD plan optimization. In this paper, we propose a feeder re-assign improvement algorithm for a specific type of SMD machine with a piano type multi-head gantry. Computational results on some real-world benchmark data sets show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.