Assigning Components to Robotic Workcells for Electronic Assembly

Abstract

In a multiproduct assembly line, circuit packs are routed to robotic workcells for component insertion. Each type of circuit pack is routed only to the workcells having one or more of the needed components. We describe a problem of partitioning a given set of components among a group of identical workcells. The assignment should ensure load balance among the workcells and minimize the total workcell visits by circuit packs. We model this problem as an integer program and present an iterative heuristic algorithm that solves a sequence of network-flow models. Our experimental results show that the algorithm performs well on medium to large test problems constructed from real data.