Simultaneous Generation of Assembly Plans and Schedules in Electronics Assembly Operations

Assembly planning and scheduling are two major functions in circuit board manufacturing. Currently, assembly plans are developed in the absence of information about the state of the shop floor at the execution time of the assembly operation. In effect, these assembly plans may impose unnecessary restrictions on scheduling. As a result,scheduling conflicts, bottlenecks, imbalance in assembly lines and machine congestion that lead to lateness and excessive production and shipping costs are inevitable. Compares the performances of the traditional method of isolated planning and scheduling with a proposed method of simultaneous generation of assembly plans and schedules in electronic assembly operations. Simulated scenarios indicate the potential superiority of the integrated system.