A Conceptual Framework of an Advanced Planning and Scheduling System for Printed Circuit Board Manufacturing Lines

Abstract

Advanced planning and scheduling (APS), which is one of the most advanced technologies in manufacturing management applications, is emerged to resolve the shortcomings of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and manufacturing execution systems (MES) as a planning and scheduling tool. In this paper, we suggest a conceptual design of an APS system, specific for printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing lines. In general, the PCB line can be regarded as a hybrid flow shop in which there are serial workstations, each with unrelated parallel machines, and has special characteristics such as complex and re-entrant flows, high and sequence-dependent setup times, subcontracting in the operation level, etc. Although there are a number of commercially available APS packages, they are not directly applicable to the PCB lines due to these characteristics. Therefore, we suggest a new conceptual design of APS, called PCB-APS in this paper, which consists of five modules: work module, simulation run module, dispatching rule generation module, simulation model generation module, and master data input module. The PCB-APS suggested in this paper considers the characteristics of the PCB lines in more details, and hence can improve the system performances significantly.