Setup reduction in printed circuit board assembly by efficient sequencing

Abstract

Component setup time in printed circuit board (PCB) assembly makes up a significant part of the total production time in PCB manufacturing. The sequence in which PCBs are assembled is one of the fundamental factors determining the number of component switches that are needed. group technology techniques have been used to group PCB boards into similar groups to determine the assembly sequence. The measure of similarity is the key to the grouping problem. In PCB assembly, the similarity must be considered not only amongst different PCBs but must also taking into account the varying contents of the feeder rack on which the components are mounted in an incremental mode. In this paper, a new grouping strategy that combines the feeder rack contents into the similarity measure for efficient grouping is proposed. The groups of PCBs are then sequenced efficiently using a heuristic that resembles greedy tree traversal. The new grouping and group sequencing strategy outperforms existing methods of grouping particularly for large PCB component incidence matrices.