Optimal scheduling of material handling devices in a PCB production line: Problem formulation and a polynomial algorithm

Modern automated production lines usually use one or multiple computer-controlled robots or hoists for material handling between workstations. A typical application of such lines is an automated electroplating line for processing printed circuit boards (PCBs). In these systems, cyclic production policy is widely used due to large lot size and simplicity of implementation. This paper addresses cyclic scheduling of a multihoist electroplating line with constant processing times. The objective is to minimize the cycle time, or equivalently to maximize the production throughput, for a given number of hoists. We propose a mathematical model and a polynomial algorithm for this scheduling problem. Computational results on randomly generated instances are reported.