Using A-Teams to optimize automatic insertion of electronic components

We present in this paper a computational system whose goal is to optimize the automatic electronic component insertion process on a particular inserting machine, the Panasert AVK machine. First of all, we present an analysis of this optimization problem, showing that it corresponds to a certain kind of combination of two NP-hard type problems, the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). We describe then the architecture of the system, called OPTIMA, that was built using a technique known as Asynchronous Teams (A-Teams). Finally, we present both the results obtained and the conclusions inferred, where we show the viability of this technique when applied to this class of problems.