Optimization of the Assignment of Circuit Cards To Assembly Lines in Electronics Assembly

This paper presents a novel approach for solving the circuit card to assembly line assignment problem that occurs frequently in electronic assembly systems. The line assignment problem involves considering several interrelated process planning problems such as assigning printed circuit cards to assembly lines and assigning component types to machines to balance workload. This problem may also be affected by the results of the machine configuration decisions. In this research, the line assignment problem is formulated as a large scale mixed integer programming problem and then solved using problem decomposition along with the branch-and-bound algorithm. Techniques for improving the solution time are discussed, and the solution approach is demonstrated using industry representative data sets from Lucent Technologies. For the data sets considered, the solution approach provides solutions within 2% of optimal in approximately 6 minutes of computation time on a Sun UltraSparc 2 Workstation.