A Comparison of Group and Minimum Setup Strategies in PCB Assembly

In printed circuit board (PCB) assembly, the majority of electronic components are inserted by high-speed placement machines. Although the efficient utilization of the machinery is vital for a manufacturer, it is hard to fully realize in high-mix low-volume production environments which are nowadays common in electronics assembly. On the machine level, the component setup strategy adopted by the manufacturer has a significant impact on the overall production efficiency. In this paper we compare two setup strategies proposed in the literature and review the suggested implementations. To evaluate the solutions we introduce a cost function which accounts both the number of machine setup occasions and the total number of component setup operations. We conclude that methods based on the group setup strategy yield better overall results.