A Scan-Based Hierarchical Heuristic Optimization Algorithm for PCB Assembly Process

Surface mount technology is essential to the development of the electronic manufacturing industry. This article studies optimizing the surface mount process for the beam-head placement machine. A mixed-integer programming (MIP) model is proposed for this problem, which is decomposed into three interconnected hierarchical parts: feeder allocation; component assignment; and pick-and-place (PAP) sequence problems. This article proposes an efficient hierarchical framework with three elaborately designed heuristics to solve the above problem. The design of the scan-based algorithms optimizes the subobjectives of feeder allocation and component assignment. First, the allocation heuristic arranges the feeders into slots as a prerequisite for other problems. Then, the component assignment heuristic determines the component type for each head with a variety of criteria and long short-term objectives. Finally, the PAP sequence problem is solved using a modified beam search algorithm. The proposed algorithm offers advantages in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and extension, which can satisfy various customization demands. Experiments are conducted on our self-designed placement machine using industrial and randomly generated data. Computational experiments show that the scan-based heuristic algorithm obtains near-optimal solutions with a gap of 9.93% averagely compared with the proposed MIP model and provides efficiency improvement over the mainstream studies.