This paper presents a hierarchical heuristic to balance the workloads among multiple identical high-speed revolver-head gantry-type surface mount technology (SMT) machines in a printed circuit board (PCB) assembly line. The nozzle assignment, the component allocation, and the single machine optimization decisions are made with the objective of minimizing the assembly cycle time. An integer programming mathematical model is developed, and a deterministic hierarchical heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve this NP-hard problem efficiently. The experiment results show that the proposed heuristic algorithm reduces the cycle time by 6.94% on average compared to the industrial solutions.
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