Computer-aided process planning in printed circuit card assembly

The goal of the research reported here is to develop a general approach and the necessary methodologies and tools to allow circuit card assembly manufacturers to determine the optimal strategy for operating an assembly line, and to rapidly generate optimal or near-optimal line setups. The objective is to maximize total production rate over a desired product mix subject to capacity, technological, and production requirement constraints for the planning horizon. The authors develop the decision problems required for process planning, discuss their approaches to solving the decision problems, and present some case study results