Optimisation for surface mount placement machines

Optimisation of feeder setup and component placement sequence are very important to the efficiency of surface mount placement machines. Much works have been conducted to solve this problem. However, the technological characteristics of the placement machine influences the nature of the planning problems to be solved and the formulation of the associated models. As a result, little consensus exists as to what a suitable model should be for a given machine characteristics, and the formulations proposed by different authors tend to be difficult to compare. Hence, this paper will survey the relation between models, assembly machine technologies and heuristic methods.