A comparison of search techniques for minimizing assembly time in printed wiring assembly

In the robotics assembly of DPP model, the coordinates of assembly point and magazine are dynamically changed during robotics assembly so that evaluation of the assembly efficiency is extremely complicated. To route the robotics travel, most related investigations have utilized the fixed coordinate of insertion points and magazine using the Traveling Salesman Problems (TSP) method to sequence the insertion points after arbitrarily assigning the magazine. However, robotics travel routing should be based on a relative coordinate to obtain a better solution because the robotics, board and magazine are simultaneously moved at different speeds during assembly. To resolve such a dynamically combinatorial problem, this study presents the Genetic Algorithm (GA), Simulated Annealing (SA), and Tabu Search (TS) based algorithms. These approaches can simultaneously arrange the insertion sequence and assign the magazine slots by the computer and yield a better performance compared to the conventional approach. Results presented herein also demonstrate that the larger the number of insertion points and/or part numbers the better the performance. These approaches are also compared. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.