Printed circuit board scheduling in an openshop manufacturing environment

Printed circuit boards are used in a myriad of commercial and consumer products in today’s marketplace. In this paper, we address the problem of inserting/placing components on printed circuit boards using automated insertion/placement machines. The motivation to examine this problem stems from joint work with a major electronics manufacturer who not only introduced us to the manufacturing environment but also provided data for testing and validating our component allocation and scheduling methodology. The results of our analysis can be used to trade-off operational savings of reduced cycle times versus tactical costs of reorganizing the equipment on the shop floor. Further, we also are able to develop and validate a three step hierarchical scheduling methodology for use in similar manufacturing environments.