An Assignment-Balance-Optimization Algorithm for Minimizing Production Cycle Time of a Printed Circuit Board Assembly Line

This paper deals with the cycle time minimization problem that determines the productivity in printed circuit board (PCB) with n components using the m placement machines. This is known as production cycle time determination problem (PCTDP). The polynomial time algorithm to be obtain the optimal solution has been unknown yet, therefore this hard problem classified by NP-complete. This paper gets the initial assignment result with the machine has minimum unit placement time per each component firstly. Then, the balancing process with reallocation from overhead machine to underhead machine. Finally, we perform the swap optimization and get the optimal solution of cycle time $T^*$ within O(mn) computational complexity. For experimental data, the proposed algorithm can be obtain the same result as integer programming+branch-and-bound (IP+B&B) and B&B.