Scheduling optimization of component mounting in printed circuit board assembly by prioritizing simultaneous pickup

In this paper, we propose a new method for reducing assembly time in printed circuit board (PCB) assembly by prioritizing efficient simultaneous pickup operation of placement machines. Despite using the same placement machine, the efficiency of the schedule results in major different assembly time. Therefore, it is important to optimize the scheduling of component mounting. There are three major problems of the scheduling: (1) component feeder location (affects efficiency of pickup operation), (2) mounting sequencing (affects total distance of the mounting tour), and (3) simultaneous pickup (affects efficiency of pickup operation). To solve these problems, this paper proposes the following approaches. We solve (1) and (3) in a heuristic way by using a random multi-start local search. We solve (2) greedily with putting the result of the feeder array to effective use. The effectiveness of the proposed method was shown through simulations.