SL.

N
O:
TITLE OF
THE PAPER
AUTHORS NAME ABSTRACT
1 Manufacturing
an
environmentall
y friendly PCB
using existing
industrial
processes and
equipment

A. Ryan, H. Lewis
Robotics and Computer-
Integrated Manufacturing 23
(2007) 720726
This paper investigates the
possibility of utilising an additive
screen printing process with
conductive ink and adhesive
together with a degradable substrate
to identify whether this process
offers a viable alternative to current
subtractive methods of PCB
manufacture.Existing manufacturing
equipment and production process
were adopted in order to establish
the compatibility of a sustainable
and environmental friendly PCB
with these processes. Experimental
trials have shown that by using a
stainless steel stencil 150 mm thick
in conjunction with an MPM
Ultraprint machine with a printing
speed of 89 mm/s, a squeegee
pressure of 0.97 bar and a downstop
of 1.9 mm successful printing of the
electrically conductive adhesive was
achieved. It was also shown that the
substrate was compatible with
electronic placement technology and
convection oven. Comparisons of
the electronic assemblies to an
industrial IPC standard illustrated
that it is possible to develop a
circuit, which is deemed acceptable
under this standard. It can be
concluded therefore that a screen
printed conductive ink pattern, when
printed on a degradable substrate
can offer a viable alternative to
current printed circuit boards and
can be manufactured using existing
technology and manufacturing
processes.
2
Optimisation
for Surface
Mount
Placement
Machines

1
Masri Ayob ,
2
Peter
Cowling, And
3
Graham
Kendall.
3
Automated Scheduling,
Optimisation and Planning
(ASAP) Research Group,

Optimisation of feeder setup and
component placement sequence are
very important to the efficiency of
surface mount placement machines.
Much works have been conducted to
solve this problem. However, the
technological characteristics of the
placement machine influences the
nature of the planning problems to
be solved and the formulation of the
associated models. As a result, little
consensus exists as to what a
suitable model should be for a given
machine characteristics, and the
formulations proposed by different
authors tend to be difficult to
compare. Hence, this paper will
survey the relation between models,
assembly machine technologies and
heuristic methods.
Keywords: Modelling,
Optimisation, Electronic Assembly,
Printed Circuit Board Assembly,
SMT.


3 Inline
Component
Placement
Inspection:
Lowering
PCB
Assembly
Costs with
Continuous
Quality
Improvement

Bob Kelley and John
Weisgerber
GSI Lumonics
In-line inspection during SMT
assembly is becoming a requirement
to assure the quality of todays
electronic products and to reduce
the manufacturers costs of scrap
and rework. It is important to
simultaneously meet the goals of
producing a cost competitive
product while continuing to meet or
exceed customers quality
expectations. An effective way to
work towards this goal is to
implement Continuous Quality
Improvement (CQI). Two of the
basic principals in implementing
CQI are to continuously improve
all processes and to mobilize data
and team knowledge to improve
decision making. REF 1In-line
inspection during SMT assembly
provides the data and knowledge
needed for this effort.
There are three major applications
for inspection during SMT
assembly: solder paste inspection
before component placement,
component placement inspection
before reflow, and post-reflow
inspection, which often includes
some type of solder joint checking.
This article focuses on the uses of
automated inspection technology for
component placement before
reflow. (See the Sidebar Choose
the Right Place for In-Line
Inspection for a summary of in-line
inspection applications.)
In-line inspection for component
placement is becoming more
popular as component sizes
continue to shrink, boards become
smaller and more densely populated,
placement rates become faster, and
cycle times become shorter. Errors
such as missing, misaligned, or
incorrectly rotated components can
cause over one-half of all defects
that are found after reflow.
Advantages of pre-reflow in-line
inspection for component placement
include lower rework costs, better
process control, and the capability
for improvement of the placement
process to further reduce defect
rates.
Inspection cycle time is critical for
in-line applications. As
manufacturing cycle times become
shorter, it becomes more difficult to
manually check each board for
proper assembly. In-line automated
systems must be fast enough to do
the job within the allowed cycle
time. Most people are not willing to
increase overall manufacturing
cycle time to do inspection. Because
product life cycles are getting
shorter, and many different
products are often run on a single
SMT line, short programming times
and product changeover times are
also important.
4 Setup
Optimization
in High-Mix
Surface Mount
PCB Assembly
Kari Salonen

University of Turku
Department of Information
Technology
2008
The thesis discusses machine setup
problems which arise in high-mix,
low volume production
environments of printed circuit
board assembly (PCB) industry. We
concentrate especially on the hybrid
setup problem that is a combination
of the job grouping and minimum
setup problems. We need an
objective function that minimizes a
weighted sum of the number of
setup occasions and the number of
feeder changeovers. The aim of this
function is to model real-world
production situation. With the help
of the weighting parameter one can
put more weight on the number of
setup occasions or on feeder
changes depending on the
introduction planning situations. We
describe the problem in an exact
way by constructing an integer
programming (IP) model. While
there are problem instances of
practical size which can be solved
optimally by current software
systems there are still cases where
the problem solving with exact
methods turns out to be inefficient
and time consuming. Unfortunately,
the hybrid problem is also so hard
combinatorial problem that it can be
solved optimally only in small
problem instances even with the
best exact methods. Therefore, we
develop heuristics methods that help
us to _nd near optimal solutions and
sometimes even optimal solutions in
an easy way. In our publications we
present several new algorithms for
the problem and compare their
efficiency with other methods found
in literature.
Furthermore, we give a general
model that can be applied to
construct an efficient hybrid setup
heuristic.
5 OPTIMIZING
PRINTED
CIRCUIT
BOARD
ASSEMBLY
DURING THE
DESIGN
PROCESS
Ronald E. Giachetti
Department of Industrial
and Systems Engineering
Florida International
University
Miami
In the file
6 Virtual
Prototyping of
Electronics
Assembly
Systems
D. A. Bodner, M. Damrau,
P. M. Griffin, L. F.
McGinnis and A.
McLaughlin
Keck Virtual Factory Lab
Electronics assembly systems
typically are capital intensive and
highly automated. At the same
time, due to product sophistication
and complexity, they are difficult to
School of Industrial &
Systems Engineering
Georgia Institute of
Technology
Atlanta
design, configure and reconfigure,
and operate. A significant body of
research has investigated problems
involved in these areas, with the
goals of cycle time minimization
and line balancing. Equally
important is the ability to
experiment with different designs,
configurations and control policies
off-line, and to test the results of
algorithms developed to minimize
cycle times and balance assembly
lines.
This requires development of high-
fidelity models of system behavior
to serve as virtual prototyping
environments. In this paper, we
describe our work to date in
developing such models for single
machines and in using these models
in an instructional setting to aid
student understanding and learning.
Keywords:
Virtual prototyping, simulation, 3D
animation, electronics assembly,
experimental platform,
system performance.
7 COMPUTER
MACHINE
VISION
INSPECTION
ON PRINTED
CIRCUIT
BOARDS
FLUX
DEFECTS
American Journal of
Engineering and Applied
Sciences 6 (3): 263-273,
2013
ISSN: 1941-7020
The new visual inspection systems
techniques using real time machine
vision replace the human visual
manual inspection on PCB flux
defects, which brings harmful
effects on the board which may
come in the form of corrosion and
can cause harm to the assembly. In
short, it brings improvement in
Printed Circuit Boards (PCB)
production quality, principally
concerning the acceptance or
rejection of the PCB boards. To
develop new algorithm in image
processing which detects flux defect
at PCB board during re-flow process
and achieve good accuracy of the
PCB quality checking. The machine
will be designed and fabricated with
the total automation control system
with mechanical PCB
loader/unloader, pneumatic system
handler with vacuum cap, vision
inspection station and final
classification station (accept or
reject). The image processing
system is based on shape (pattern)
and color image analysis techniques
with Matrox Imaging Library. The
shape/texture of the PCB pins is
analyzed by using pattern matching
technique to detect the PCB flux
defect area. The color analysis of
the flux defect in a PCB boards are
processed based on their red color
pixel percentage in Red, Green and
Blue (RGB) model. The red color
filter band mean value of histogram
is measured and compared to the
value threshold to determine the
occurring on the PCB flux defects.
The system was tested with PCB
boards from factory production line
and achieved PCB board flux
defects sorting accuracy at 86.0%
based on proposed pattern matching
technique combined with red color
filter band histogram.
Keywords: Machine Vision, Pattern
Matching Technique, RGB Color
Model, Red Color Filter Band,
Threshold, Histogram
8 THE
DEVELOPME
NT OF A BPN
DATA
MINING
CALIBRATIO
N SYSTEM
IN A SMT
PCB
ASSEMBLY
LINE
Wurong Shih
International Journal of
Electronic Business
Management, Vol. 7, No. 4,
pp. 286-296 (2009)
Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) are
extensively used in diverse
electronic products today.
The placement process tends to be a
bottleneck in a PCB assembly line,
and many SMT PCB assembly
researches focused on improving the
process perspective of the machine
operations. This research proposed a
BPN data mining model to analyze
the effect of a head calibration
process on the defects of placement
operation in a PCB assembly line.
The analysis was able to generate a
set of values for head calibration
which reduced component
placement defects caused by
inappropriate calibration processes.
Based on the data collected from
assembly lines, this research first
uses a regression analysis to predict
the total defects caused by the
placement heads of the machine
the process is even able to predict
the defects of single Placement
head. Next, the Back-Propagation
Network (BPN) is used as a
framework for parameter training.
The development of BPN is able to
predict the placement defects caused
by each placement head of the
machine. Furthermore, the
placement head with highest defect
number is selected and a further
sensitivity analysis performed.
Based on the results of the analysis,
the individual parameter calibration
of the head is performed again to
reduce the expected defects and
increase production efficiency.
The developed model can assist
engineers to perform the calibration
process of placement heads in a
PCB assembly line and is able to
reduce defects in placement
operations so as to improve
productivity.

Keywords: Printed Circuit Board
(PCB), Surface Mount Technology
(SMT), Placement Machine, Data
Mining, Back Propagation Network
(BPN).
9 A PRINTED
CIRCUIT
BOARD
INSPECTION
SYSTEM
WITH
DEFECT
CLASSIFICA
TION
CAPABILITY
ISMAIL IBRAHIM1
,SYED ABDUL RAHMAN
SYED ABU BAKAR2

MUSA MOHD MOKJI3
, JAMEEL ABDULLA
AHMED MUKRED4
ZULKIFLI MD YUSOF5
, ZUWAIRIE IBRAHIM6
KAMAL KHALIL7
, MOHD SABERI
MOHAMAD8

International Journal of
Innovative
Management, Information
& Production ISME
International2011 ISSN
An automated visual printed circuit
board (PCB) inspection is an
approach used to counter difficulties
occurred in humans manual
inspection that can eliminates
subjective aspects and then provides
fast, quantitative, and dimensional
assessments. In this study,
referential approach has been
implemented on template and
defective PCB images to detect
numerous defects on bare PCBs
before etching process, since
etching usually contributes most
destructive defects found on PCBs.
The PCB inspection system is then
improved by incorporating a
geometrical image registration,
2185-5439
Volume 3, Number 1,
March 2012
minimum thresholding technique
and median filtering in order to
solve alignment and uneven
illumination problem. Finally,
defect classification operation is
employed in order to identify the
source for six types of defects
namely, missing hole, pin hole,
underetch, short-circuit, mousebite,
and open-circuit.

Keywords: Automated Visual
Inspection System; Image
Subtraction; Thresholding;
Image Registration; Printed Circuit
Board
10 Automatic
PCB
Inspection
Algorithms: A
Survey
Madhav Moganti1
Fikret Ercal2, Cihan H.
Dagli3
In file
11 Production
planning
problems in
printed circuit
board
assembly
Yves Crama1
Joris van de Klundert2
Frits C.R. Spieksma2
February 24, 2000
Journal title: Discrete
applied mathematics
Publisher: Elsevier Science
Volume: 123
Issue/season: 1-3
Pages: 339-361



This survey describes some of the
main optimization problems arising
in the context of production
planning for the assembly of printed
circuit boards. The discussion is
structured around a hierarchical
decomposition of the planning
process into distinct optimization
subproblems, addressing issues such
as the assignment of board types to
machine groups, the allocation of
component feeders to individual
machines, the determination of
optimal production sequences,
etc. The paper reviews the literature
on this topic with an emphasis on
the most recent developments,
on the fundamental structure of the
mathematical models and on the
relation between these models and
some `environmental' variables such
as the layout of the shop or the
product mix.
Keywords: production planning,
scheduling, sequencing, printed
circuit boards, integer programming
Models.
12
A Review on
Printed Circuit
Boards Waste
Recycling
Technologies
and Reuse of
Recovered
Nonmetallic
Materials
A Review on Printed Circuit
Boards Waste
Recycling Technologies and
Reuse of
Recovered Nonmetallic
Materials
International Journal of
Scientific & Engineering
Research, Volume 3, Issue
2, February-2012 1

From the use of renewable
resources and environmental
protection viewpoints,
recycling of waste printed
circuit boards (PCBs)
receives wide concerns as
the amounts of scrap PCBs
increases dramatically In
recent years there has been
increasing concern about the
growing volume of end of
life electronics and the fact
that much of it is consigned
to landfill without any
attempt being made to
recycle the nonmetallic
materials it contains. The
production of electric and
electronic equipment (EEE)
is growing rapidly in most
developed countries. Waste
of electric and electronic
equipment (WEEE) is
significantly increasing. A
large amount of nonmetallic
materials in printed circuit
board (PCBs) are disposed
of by combustion and
disposal in landfill as the
main method for treating
nonmetals in PCBs, but it
may cause secondary
pollution and resource
wasting. Therefore, it is
urgent to develop a proper
recycling technology for
waste PCBs. Several
recycling technologies and
potential reuses of recovered
nonmetallic PCBs were
reviewed in this paper. From
the review, it can be said
that, PCBs recycling process
usually includes three
process which is
pretreatment, physical
recycling, and chemical
recycling and the recovered
nonmetals w ere used to
make models, construction
materials and composite
boards. The PCB nonmetal
products have better
mechanical characteristics
and durability than
traditional materials and
fillers. Products derived
from PCB waste processing
have been brought into
industrial production. The
study shows that PCB
nonmetals can be reused in
profitable and
environmentally friendly
ways.
Keywords printed circuit
board, nonmetallic,
recovery, precious metals,
recycling technology
13
Optimizing the
Operations of
Chip Shooter
Machines
Ekrem DUMAN
Ali Fuat ALKAYA
Hseyin DEMiRKALE
Artificial bee colony (ABC)
algorithm is recently proposed
algorithm that is inspired from the
foraging behavior of honey bees in
nature. ABC has been applied to the
continuous numerical problems. In
this study, we present ABC
algorithm to chip shooter machines
which are used for printed circuit
board(PCB) assembly, proposed
new methodologies and compared it
with Simulated Annealing(SA).
Experimental results comparing the
proposed ABC and SA are
presented.
Keywords, Artificial bee colony,
Simulated annealing,
Chip Shooter Machines.
14 Optimization
of Printed
Circuit board
design
assembly
based on
DPMO metrics
R. Soukup 1
1Katedra technologi a
men, Fakulta
elektrotechnick , ZU v
Plzni,
Univerzitn 26,
Plze
The paper deals with optimization
of printed circuit board assembly
(PCBA) design based on defects per
million opportunities (DPMO)
metric. Due to DPMO data
predictions for a given new PCBA
design is possible to optimize its

Electroscope. 2010
layout in terms of yield and quality
even before the PCBA pilot
production. The DPMO data are
obtained from the below presented
yield-DPMO model. The model is
based on a combination of elements
from DPMO calculation according
to the IPC 7912 standard and two
most used yield prediction
methodologies, namely: process
yield and board design yield. The
model provides not only DPMO
data, but also assembly process
yield prediction that can assist the
manufacturers in determining
reliable estimates of production
capabilities.
15
Product
Assembly
Sequence
Optimization
Based on
Genetic
Algorithm.

Azman Yasin1
, Nurnasran Puteh2
Ruslizam Daud3
Mazni Omar4
, Sharifah Lailee Syed-
Abdullah
--Azman Yasin et al. /
(IJCSE) International
Journal on Computer
Science and Engineering
Vol. 02, No. 09, 2010,
3065-3070
Genetic algorithm (GA) is a search
technique used in computing to find
approximate solution to
optimization and search problem
based on the theory of natural
selection. This study investigates the
application of GA in optimizing
product assembly sequences. The
objective is to minimize the time
taken for the parts to be assembled
into a unit product. A single
objective GA is used to obtain the
optimal assembly sequence,
exhibiting the minimum time taken.
The assembly experiment is done
using a case study product and
results were compared with manual
assembly sequences using the
Design for Assembly (DFA)
method. The results indicate that
GA can be used to obtain a near
optimal solution for minimizing the
process time in sequence assembly.
This shows that GA can be applied
as a tool for assembly sequence
planning that can be implemented at
the design process to obtain faster
result than the traditional methods.
Keywords: Genetic Algorithm;
Product Sequence Assembly;
Design for Assembly; Artificial
Intelligence
16 Guidelines for Jose M. Framinan1 It has frequently been stated that
the
deployment
and
implementatio
n of
manufacturin
g scheduling
systems

, Rubn Ruiz2

March 26, 2010
International Journal of
Production , 2012 -
Taylor & Francis
there exists a gap between
production scheduling theory and
practice. In order to put theoretical
findings into practice, advances in
scheduling models and solution
procedures should be embedded into
a piece of software a scheduling
system in companies. This results
in a process that entails (1)
determining its functional features,
and (2) adopting a successful
strategy for its development and
deployment. In this paper we
address the latter question and
review the related literature in order
to identify descriptions and
recommendations of the main
aspects to be taken into account
when developing such systems.
These issues are then discussed and
classified, resulting in a set of
guidelines that can help
practitioners during the process of
developing and deploying a
scheduling system.

17
Scheduling
Component
Placement
Operations for
Collect-and-
Place Type
PCB
Assembly
Machines

Journal: International
Journal of Production
Research

23-Apr-2006

Guenther, Hans-Otto; TU
Berlin, Production
Management
Yimaz, Ihsan; TU Berlin,
Production Management
Kulak, Osman; Pamukkale
University, Dept. of
Industrial
Engineering
Keywords: GENETIC
ALGORITHMS, ELECTRONICS
ASSEMBLY.
Component placement is one of the
most time-consuming operations in
printed circuit board (PCB)
assembly and dominates the cycle
time of any PCB assembly line. In
our study, we focus on collect-and-
place machines which first collect a
number of electronic components
from the component magazine and
then place them one-by-one onto the
PCB. With this type of machinery
two problems arise, i.e. generating
placement tours and determining the
placement sequence within each
tour. The objective is to minimise
the assembly cycle time per board.
Numerical experiments show that
high-quality solutions are obtained
within very short CPU time.


18 Minimizing
total tardiness
of orders with
re-entrant lots
in a hybrid
flowshop

SW Choi, YD Kim*, GC
Lee - International Journal
of Production , 2005 -
Taylor & Francis
This study focuses on a hybrid
flowshop scheduling problem, in
which there are serial stages, each
with identical parallel machines. In
the hybrid flowshop, each order is
composed of multiple lots with the
same due date, and each lot can be
processed on any one of parallel
machines at each stage. In addition,
there are reentrant flows since lots
of certain orders have to visit the
stages twice. Heuristic algorithms
are suggested for the scheduling
problem with the objective of
minimizing total tardiness of a given
set of orders. In these algorithms,
the list-scheduling method is
employed, and lots are scheduled
with priorities determined with a
construction method. Computational
experiments are performed on
randomly generated test problems.
Results show that the suggested
algorithms perform better than well-
known dispatching rules for various
scheduling problems and an
algorithm that is used in a real
system.
19 Methodology
To Develop
Heuristic For
Re-Entrant
Flow Shop
With Two
Potential
Dominant
Machines
Using
Bottleneck
Approach
Salleh Ahmad Bareduan &
Sulaiman Hasan
International Journal of
Combinatorial Optimization
Problems and Informatics,
Vol. 3, No. 3, Sep-Dec
2012, pp. 81-93. ISSN:
2007-1558
Component placement is one of the
most time-consuming operations in
printed circuit board (PCB)
assembly and dominates the cycle
time of any PCB assembly line. In
our study, we focus on collect-and-
place machines which first collect a
number of electronic components
from the component magazine and
then place them one-by-one onto the
PCB. With this type of machinery
two problems arise, i.e. generating
placement tours and determining the
placement sequence within each
tour. The objective is to minimise
the assembly cycle time per board.
Numerical experiments show that
high-quality solutions are obtained
within very short CPU time.
20 DEVELOPM
ENT OF
MULTI-
Pei-Chann Chang *, Jih-
Chang Hsieh ** and Yen-
Wen Wang * Proceedings
Scheduling in the drilling operation
of the printed circuit board industry
deeply annoys the
OBJECTIVE
GENETIC
ALGORITH
MS FOR
SCHEDULIN
G
of the Fifth Asia Pacific
I ndustrial Engineering and
Management Systems
Conference 2004
production management staff on the
shop floor due to its high
complexity of permutations or
combination of jobs, machines, and
resource constraints. In this
research, two multi-objective
genetic algorithms are proposed to
deal with such a complicated real-
world case. Real-world
instances are applied as well to
evaluate the proposed algorithms.
The result indicates that
both VMOGA and AMOGA are
effective.
Keywords: Multi-Objective
Genetic Algorithm, Scheduling,
Printed Circuit Board
21
A particle
swarm
optimization
approach for
components
placement
inspection on
printed circuit
boards

CH Wu, DZ Wang, A Ip,
DW Wang, CY Chan -
Intelligent Manufacturing,
Journal of Intelligent
Manufacturing
October 2009, Volume
20, Issue 5, pp 535-549
- Springer

The importance of the inspection
has been magnified by the
requirements of the modern
manufacturing environment. In
electronics mass-production
manufacturing facilities, especially
in the printed circuit board (PCB)
industry, 100% quality assurance of
all work-in-process and finished
goods is required in order to reduce
the scrap costs and re-work rate.
One of the challenges for PCB
inspection is in the use of a surface
mount device (SMD) placement
check. Missing, misaligned or
wrongly rotated components are the
critical causes of defects. To prevent
the PCB from having these defects,
inspection must be done before the
solder reflow process commences,
otherwise, everything will be too
late. The research reported in this
paper concentrates on automatic
object searching techniques, in a
grey-scale captured image, for
locating multiple components on a
PCB. The presented approach
includes the normalized cross
correlation (NCC) based multi-
template matching (MTM) method.
The searching process has been
carried out by using the proposed
accelerated species based particle
swarm optimization (ASPSO)
method and the genetic algorithm
(GA) approach as a reference. The
experimental results of the ASPSO-
based MTM approaches are
reported.
22
Grouping
components
in printed
circuit board
assembly with
limited
component
staging
capacity and
single card
setup:
problem
characteristic
s and solution
procedures
M. S. DASKIN , O.
MAIMON , A. SHTUB
and D. BRAHA*
int. j. prod. res., 1997, vol.
35, no. 6, 16171638

New England Complex
Systems Institute
The problem of grouping Printed
Circuit Board (PCB) components to
minimize
the total component and PCB
loading cost subject to a capacity
constraint on the
number of types of components per
group is formulated as an integer
linear
programming problem. The problem
is shown to be NP-complete.
Characteristics of the solution are
outlined and a heuristic algorithm is
discussed. For the case in which it is
optimal to load each PCB exactly
once,
the solution characteristics can be
used to obtain a lower bound on the
objective
function for any set of constraints
on pairs of PCBs that must be
produced using
the same group of components. The
bounds and the heuristic procedure
are used
to develop a branch and bound
algorithm. Computational results are
given for
four test problems derived from
industrial contexts.
23 Simulation-
based
performance
analysis and
optimization o
f electronics
assembly
equipment

J. vanara and Z. Krlov
Institute of Control and
Industrial Informatics,
Faculty of El
June 9 12, 2009
In file

24 A Flexible
Simulation
Tool for
Manufacturing
MARIA DE LOS A.
IRIZARRY1 JAMES R.
WILSON2 JAIME
TREVINO3
In file
Cell Design,
II:
Response
Surface
Analysis and
Case Study
January 2000)
25 THE HYBRID
HEURISTIC
SYSTEM IN
BALANCING
THE PCB
ASSEMBLY
LINE OF
SURFACE
MOUNT
TECHNOLOG
Y WITH
MULTIPLE
PLACEMENT
MACHINES
Wurong Shih
International Journal of
Electronic Business
Management, Vol. 7, No. 1,
pp. 37-44 (2009)
Printed circuit boards (PCBs) are
extensively used in diverse
electronic products today.
The placement process is generally
the bottleneck in a PCB assembly
line. Many researchers have
indicated that an optimal component
placement sequence reduces the
cycle time of an assembly line with
single placement machines.
However, in current PCB assembly
lines, more than one placement
machine, including Pick-and-Place
and Chip Shooter machines, are
concurrently used. Therefore, in the
PCB assembly lines with multiple
placement machines, the
improvement of a single placement
machine is no longer an issue in
increasing throughput rate. The line
balancing tasks within machines has
a greater impact on the throughput
rate. This research uses a hybrid
heuristic approach in designing a
prototype system to implement line
balancing tasks within the multiple
placement machines of a PCB
assembly line. First a minimum
spanning tree algorithm is
introduced to solve the problem in
allocating components to various
feeder slots. Then, by incorporating
with the initial results of this step, a
mathematical model is
developed to solve the line
balancing problem faced in the
assembly line. The developed line
balancing model uses the
combination of formulations and
experts reasoning knowledge to
rearrange the component groups
which are placed by the placement
machines. The proposed system
model is used to construct a
prototype system that assists the
process planners to reduce the cycle
time of the assembly line so as to
increase the throughput rate.

Keywords: Surface Mount
Technology, PCB Assembly, Line
Balancing, Genetic Algorithm
26 A Research on
the Mixed-
Line
Production
Scheduling
Problem of a
Flow-shop
System
Hsiang-Hsi Huang1
*, Peihua Sung2
, Chianying Huang,3
Cheng-hsun Li
4
This paper is to establish and solve
the re-scheduling problems under a
flow-shop mixed-line production
planning. A case study of the final
stage, module manufacturing, of
TFT-LCD is provided for
illustration of the developed
mechanism. In this research, the
mixed-line production system and
its rescheduling problems are
discussed. The buffer management
and the DBR scheduling methods
based on the Theory of Constraints
are used to detect, identify, and
level the bottleneck problems in the
system. The direct contribution of
the results is to increase the
production flexibility and mobility
of the manufacturing scheduling
system and to benefit the entire
members of supply chain system.
The simulation software, Flexsim, is
used to construct and evaluate the
developed model, some phenomena
of simulated system performance on
the maximum delay of orders, the
total cost of delay, and make span
are discussed.
Keywords: bottleneck, DBR, mixed-
line production, re-scheduling.