Feeder Setup Optimization Techniques with Offline Setup Strategy for a Gantry-Type Placement Machine(<Special Issue>Norms the of Manufacturing and Machine Tools)

In this paper, a feeder setup planning problem of a gantry-type placement machine is investigated to increase productivity of printed circuit board (PCB) assembly line. We propose a new planning algorithm based on offline setup strategy that exploits a cart swapping mechanism of the gantry-type placement machine. Because of computational complexity, we adopt a hierarchical decomposition of the planning problem. Important subproblems are PCB sequencing and feeder assignment. We solve heuristically the PCB sequencing problem using 2 way balanced partitioning of a hypergraph. For the feeder assignment problem, we develop a mixed integer programming model and solve it using branch-and-bound method. The proposed algorithm is tested on real-life PCB data. It is shown that the productivity of offline setup strategy is better than that of group setup strategy and our algorithm achieves significant improvement in productivity.