Improving the productivity of a multi-head surface mounting machine with genetic algorithms

As a practical application, we focus on the systematic genetic algorithm for a multi-head surface mounting machine. The multi-head surface mounting machine is becoming increasingly popular due to its merit that the mounting speed is high though the price is low. Since the scheduling problem for these machines is known to be of a combinatorial nature and NP-hard, no exact algorithm has been proposed. A genetic algorithm (GA) has been recognized as an efficient and useful procedure for solving large combinatorial optimization problems. The paper proposes to use a GA to solve the scheduling problem for the multi-head surface mounting machine. The result of computer simulation shows that the proposed method performs better than the conventional methods