Abstract
Electroplating is a major process in the manufacturing of printed circuit boards. Scheduling the movement of material handling hoists for electroplating processes is generally known as the Hoist Scheduling Problem (HSP) and has been proven to be NP-complete. The objective of HSP is to find a cyclic sequence of hoist moves that maximizes the production throughput. For the past two decades, various optimization and heuristic techniques have been proposed to solve the problem. However, these methods are often limited to the elementary problems. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) approach using constraint logic programming has been applied to solve the cyclic HSP, but did not consider problems with duplicated process tanks. In this paper, we apply constraint satisfaction to solve HSP with duplicate process tanks. A binary search procedure is proposed and a tighter bound to the cycle length is introduced to reduce the computation effort. The proposed algorithm can be easily implemented on any personal computer with reasonable performance so as to be useful on the shop floor. Finally, we present results for several benchmark examples.
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