A Novel Local Search Integer-Programming-Based Heuristic for PCB Assembly on Collect-and-Place Machines Anupam Seth , Diego Klabjan , Placid M. Ferreira Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL November 17, 2012 Abstract: This paper presents the development of a novel vehicle-routing-based algorithm for optimizing component pick-up and placement on a collect-and-place type machine in printed circuit board manufactur- ing. We present a two-phase heuristic that produces solutions of remarkable quality with respect to other known approaches in a reasonable amount of computational time. In the first phase, a construction procedure is used combining greedy aspects and solutions to subproblems modeled as a generalized traveling salesman problem and quadratic assignment problem. In the second phase, this initial solution is refined through an iterative framework requiring an integer programming step. A detailed description of the heuristic is provided and extensive computational results are presented. Keywords: heuristic, local search, integer programming, printed circuit board, vehicle-routing, gener- alized TSP 1 Introduction Many manufacturing enterprises in today’s world are under severe economic pressure to find ways to sat- isfy increasingly demanding customers who are seeking higher and higher levels of performance on the two conflicting dimensions of cost and time to delivery. These pressures are mounting for organizations whose production processes require expensive, complex automation, and with a broad assortment of products. Manufacturers operating in such conditions must find ways of planning their production, which simulta- neously enable both high resource utilization and a quick response to changing demands both in terms of short-term product mix variations and longer-term product range changes as new products are introduced and old products become obsolete. The electronics industry continues to rank as a very valuable and key industry in this information age at the turn of the century and beyond. Also, most electronic products manufactured today contain printed circuit boards (PCBs) as critical elements [12]. Therefore, PCB manufacturing plays a very important role in today’s economy. Global revenues for the PCB industry exceeded 50 billion in 2007 and are expected to reach more than 76 billion in 2012 [35]. PCBs are manufactured in automated assembly lines, where high-speed placement machines place com- ponents on the boards. A line can assemble components on multiple types of PCBs and has one or several high speed machines to perform the actual placement of operations [36]. The assembly of PCBs is a complex task involving the placement of hundreds (even up to a few thousand) of electronic components in different shapes and sizes at specific locations on a board. Because electronics technology can quickly become obsolete, minimizing the time of PCB design and manufacture is crucial and an increasingly significant concern for electronics firms [21]. In order to remain competitive in the PCB market, manufacturers must concentrate their efforts on improving the efficiency of their (now dominantly SMT, or surface-mount technology, as opposed to the older dominantly THT, or through-hole technology) assembly lines. Production planning and control, process planning, and quality control are important activities for achieving this efficiency in the PCB industry. Of these activities, process 1