Sequence placement planning for high‐speed PCB assembly machine

Abstract

In order to handle high and rapid production demands, printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturers have employed high‐speed surface mount machines into their assembly lines. These machines have abilities of fast component placements, but provide challenges for process engineers to optimise the component placement sequences and feeder arrangements via effective planning. A computer program was developed based on operating concepts using genetic algorithm, to solve for various component placement sequencing planning of the high‐speed chipshooter. Genetic algorithms are a class of general purpose search methods based on the concepts of genetic evolution and survival of the fittest. The program provides information on component placement sequences and feeder arrangements for optimal assembly times. Initial tests have shown that the size of the parent space affects the convergence of the solutions during iterations. Finally, comparisons of results have shown improvement over those previously obtained by other researchers.

A survey of surface mount device placement machine optimisation: Machine classification

“…Other works which report improving the turret-type SMD placement machine include Ellis et al (2002), Ng (1998Ng ( , 2000 and Ong and Tan (2002).…”

PCB assembly optimisation using the Bees Algorithm enhanced with TRIZ operators

“…The PCB assembly problem with MBTD characteristics for 50 PCB components (as shown in Fig. 1) was introduced by Leu [2] and has been repeatedly used by others to benchmark their proposed algorithm [1,2,5,13,14,15]. Table IV highlights some of the parameters of the MBTD machine optimisation problem.…”

“…However, the placement of components on Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) is considered to be one of the most time intensive stages in PCB manufacturing [1]. The desire to maximise production efficiency makes component placement planning an important task for production engineers.…”

Combining and solving sequence dependent traveling salesman and quadratic assignment problems in PCB assembly

“…In this study, we focus on optimizing the operations of chip shooter placement machines because they are widely accepted as the latest technology high speed placement machines [10,27,28,39,6]. Basically, these machines have multiple rotating pick and place heads and a linear feeder carriage that moves horizontally and makes available one of the next components to be placed in line with the placement head.…”