A triple objective function with a Chebychev dynamic pick-and-place point specification approach to optimise the surface mount placement machine

Optimisation can play a major role in improving the throughput of surface mount placement machines. Most previous work has reported on improving only the assembly cycle time. The movement of the feeder carrier and PCB table are not always factors which are minimised. In this paper we introduce a triple objective function with a Chebychev dynamic pick-and-place approach to optimise the sequential pick and place machine. We are focusing on improving the feeder setup. The aims are to minimise the robot assembly time, the feeder movements and the PCB table movements. To provide flexibility to our approach, we integrate three weighted parameters into the triple objective function such that one can vary the importance of each factor to be minimised. Experimental results show that our approach gives good robot assembly time and less movement of the feeder carrier and PCB table. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.