The Application of Taboo Search with Kick Strategy in Surface Mounting Arrangement

In this paper, we focus on printed circuit boards (PCB) and their components arrangement optimization problem, which is derived from electronic surface mounting manufacturing process. It includes two tasks: the sequencing of PCBs and the assignment of components on PCBs to different mounting machines. A taboo search (TS) with kick strategy is proposed to solve this problem: (1) ordinal optimization (OO) is applied to obtain a favorable initial solution. It compensates for the dependence on the initial solution of taboo search and contributes to obtain a better result in a large possibility. (2) kick strategy is embedded into taboo search, and the global searching ability of the algorithm is greatly strengthened. It not only inherits the characteristic of previous local optimization, but also avoids being trapped in the specific region which fails to find a better solution. The experimental result shows that the algorithm is effective for solving the PCBs and their components arrangement optimization problem.