A
popular gantry-type placement machine includes several interconnected,
autonomously operating component placement modules and the machine was
designed so as to able to use different kinds of placement heads and
vacuum nozzles in the modules, which can be easily changed. Although
this increases the flexibility of the production line, the
reconfiguration phases of the modules may be unproductive and one should
keep them to a minimum. In addition, the production times can be
shortened by balancing the workloads of the machine modules. Here, a
two-step optimisation method for the machine reconfiguration and
workload balancing in the case of multiple Printed Circuit Borad (PCB)
batches of different sizes and PCB types is presented. The objective is
to minimise the total production time, and keep the machine
configuration the same for all batches. The proposed algorithm is
iterative and it applies integer programming for the workload balancing
along with an evolutionary algorithm that searches for the best machine
configuration. In experiments, for single PCB types the proposed
algorithm obtained optimal or near optimal solutions. For multiple PCB
types the solutions favour the PCB types that have a bigger production
time due to greater batch sizes, but the total production time is still
close to optimal.