Production planning problems in printed circuit board assembly

This survey describes some of the main optimization problems arising in the context of production planning for the assembly of printed circuit boards. The discussion is structured around a hierarchical decomposition of the planning process into distinct optimization subproblems, addressing issues such as the assignment of board types to machine groups, the allocation of component feeders to individual machines, the determination of optimal production sequences, etc. The paper reviews the literature on this topic with an emphasis on the most recent developments, on the fundamental structure of the mathematical models and on the relation between these models and some `environmental' variables such as the layout of the shop or the product mix.