V. Jorge Leon and Brett A. Peters
Department of Industrial Engineering
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843-3131
This paper considers the operation of component
placement equipment for the assembly of printed circuit boards
(PCBs) in a medium volume, medium variety manufacturing
environment. It focuses on the setup management and operational
planning issues associated with productive use of these expensive
resources. The concept of replanning is introduced to adapt to
changes in the production environment by explicitly considering
the initial state of the system. The partial setup strategy
is suggested as a means of efficient adaptation and as a strategy
that subsumes other setup strategies encountered in practice and
the literature. These concepts are applied to the optimization of
a single placement machine producing multiple products. The
results of using partial setups are compared with other commonly
used strategies. Experimental results suggest significant gains
at the single machine level. Future research is being pursued to
improve the solution procedures and extend these replanning
concepts to the line level.
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