Component-placement optimization for convectively cooled electronics

A discussion is presented of the optimum positioning of a sequence of convectively cooled electronic devices in order to reduce failures due to thermal factors. A set of equations is developed for optimizing the positioning of the devices. This problem is analogous to the classical operations research problem of the optimum time scheduling of several jobs on a single machine, where for each job there is a time-dependent completion penalty. Several solution techniques for solving the simplified problem are formulated and compared with respect to their accuracy and computational speed