PCB assembly: an efficient genetic algorithm for slot assignment and component pick and place sequence problems

This paper deals with the PCB assembly problem. We propose an efficient genetic algorithm to solve the problem. The algorithm uses well-known crossover and mutation operators adapted to the specific representation used. Computational experiments show that our algorithm improves the state-of-the-art result on a benchmark for the problem. Furthermore, we propose a set of benchmarks for this problem and apply our algorithm to solve each instance on this set. We compare results with those produced by a method widely used in the industry and, for each instance, we obtain the best result.