A feeder replenishment policy for a turret-head placement machine

Abstract

In this paper, a feeder replenishment strategy for a turret-head placement machine is proposed. The proposed method decreases the production time in a high volume electronics-manufacturing environment by using multiple allocations of components to feeder slots. The related reduction in production time is achieved by reducing the total number of replenishments through feeder exhaust synchronization. In our approach, we first solve a 0–1 linear programming model to reduce the downtime due to the replenishments by utilizing the unused feeder slots for multiple assignments. Since any small variation in the reel sizes will disrupt the synchronization among feeder exhausts, we propose a procedure called ‘Fixed Replenishment Policy’ to reduce this effect. The approach has been tested with data obtained from a high-volume electronics manufacturer and the results are examined.

Keywords:

• Surface mount technology
• Multiple feeder allocation
• Multiple component assignment
• Electronics manufacturing
• Printed circuit board

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank an anonymous referee for his many constructive comments. This work was funded by the NSF Center for Advanced Vehicle Electronics (CAVE), NSF Grant Number EEC-9907749.