Scheduling of drilling operations in printed circuit board factory

The drilling operation of the printed circuit board is very critical and usually is a bottleneck operation of the whole manufacturing processes. Therefore the scheduling problem of the drilling operation is very challenging and difficult because usually there are more than 50 machines on the shop floor waiting to be sequenced. The shop orders are all different based on their application purpose such as in PC industries, or telecommunication applications, i.e. the cellular phones. These orders have to be sequenced on the drilling machines and the objective of this research is to schedule these drilling operations in a near optimal manner under various constraints. Due to the complexity of this problem, a heuristic approach, i.e. the tabu search, is applied to provide a practical solution within a timely manner. Experimental results are examined to test the efficiency and effectiveness of the tabu search. When compared with the manual approach provided by the shop floor scheduler, the tabu search outperforms significantly.

[1]  Joon-Mook Lim,et al.  A genetic algorithm for a single hoist scheduling in the printed-circuit-board electroplating line , 1997 .

[2]  Chris N. Potts,et al.  Heuristics for scheduling unrelated parallel machines , 1991, Comput. Oper. Res..

[3]  K. Feldmann,et al.  Optimization and simulation of the printed circuit assembly , 1994 .

[4]  Michael J. Shaw,et al.  Learning-based scheduling in a flexible manufacturing flow line , 1994 .

[5]  Ming Liang,et al.  A tabu search approach to optimization of drilling operations , 1996 .

[6]  Raymond E. Miller,et al.  Complexity of Computer Computations , 1972 .

[7]  V. Suresh,et al.  Minimizing maximum tardiness for unrelated parallel machines , 1994 .

[8]  Costas P. Pappis,et al.  Scheduling under a common due-data on parallel unrelated machines , 1998, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[9]  Dipak Chaudhuri,et al.  Bicriteria scheduling problem for unrelated parallel machines , 1996 .

[10]  Fred W. Glover,et al.  Future paths for integer programming and links to artificial intelligence , 1986, Comput. Oper. Res..

[11]  Yeong-Dae Kim,et al.  Search heuristics for a flowshop scheduling problem in a printed circuit board assembly process , 1996 .

[12]  Jan Karel Lenstra,et al.  Approximation algorithms for scheduling unrelated parallel machines , 1987, 28th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (sfcs 1987).

[13]  Chris N. Potts,et al.  Unrelated parallel machine scheduling using local search , 1994 .

[14]  Fatima Ghedjati,et al.  Genetic algorithms for the job-shop scheduling problem with unrelated parallel constraints: heuristic mixing method machines and precedence , 1999 .

[15]  Nagraj Balakrishnan,et al.  Early/tardy scheduling with sequence dependent setups on uniform parallel machines , 1999, Comput. Oper. Res..

[16]  Robert J. Graves,et al.  Cycle time estimation for printed circuit board assemblies , 1998, Twenty Third IEEE/CPMT International Electronics Manufacturing Technology Symposium (Cat. No.98CH36205).

[17]  N. Piersma,et al.  A local search heuristic for unrelated parallel machine scheduling with efficient neighborhood search , 1996 .

[18]  C. N. Potts,et al.  Analysis of a linear programming heuristic for scheduling unrelated parallel machines , 1985, Discret. Appl. Math..

[19]  Nathalie Sauer,et al.  Heuristics for unrelated machine scheduling with precedence constraints , 1997 .

[20]  Michael J. Shaw,et al.  Scheduling printed circuit board production systems using the two-level scheduling approach , 1997 .

[21]  P. Worhach,et al.  Integrating environmental objectives in the operational planning of printed circuit board assembly , 1999 .

[22]  Kornel Ehmann,et al.  Identification and control for micro-drilling productivity enhancement , 1999 .