Abstract
The paper considers the problem of improving the productivity of surface mounting in the printed circuit board(PCB) assembly line. This problem is generally divided into two problems ; real assignment problem and pick-and -place sequencing problem which are known to have no polynomial time algorithms. In the last ten years algorithm designers have been trying to solve them separately. However they need to be solved jointly because they are highly interrelated. This paper proposes an evolutionary algorithm which can consider the two problems jointly and thus yield a better solution. In order to evaluate the proposed algorithm computer simulation is performed on real-life surface mounting machines. The proposed algorithm is expected to reduce the assembly time of surface mounting machines and thus improve the productivity.