Design of manufacturing cells: Operation assignment in printed circuit board manufacturing

Abstract

We consider an operation assignment problem that arose from a printed circuit (PC) board assembly process. Components can either be inserted on boards manually or by machine. The objective is to determine an assignment of components (operations) to a set of capacitated machines (with the remainder of the components inserted manually) to minimize the total set-up and processing cost for assembling all boards. The problem can be formulated as a mixed integer linear program, but is too large to be practically solved. For the case of one machine, we present two different solution heuristics. We show that while each can be arbitrarily bad, on average the algorithms perform quite well. For the case of multiple machines, we present four different solution heuristics. We discuss implementation of our results at Hewlett-Packard.