| The electronics manufacturing domain is characterized by high product mixes and low volumes, resource constraints of both materials and machines, continuous advances of technology, and frequent process changes required by customers, to name a few. Consequently, effective and efficient production planning becomes a complicated and challenging task for an Electronics Manufacturing Service (EMS) provider. Even though many EMS providers have adopted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, ERP systems, as commercial software, often are not particularly designed for PCB assembly lines and normally provide un-realistic production solutions for EMS manufacturing conditions. These aforementioned factors often lead to a large gap between the planned production lead time and the actual time, which further results in the challenges for EMS suppliers to fulfill their delivery commitment.;This research endeavor focused on researching and developing a prototype production planning system based on discrete event simulation modeling that can incorporate potential uncertainty factors, to ensure an accurate decision-making process in the EMS manufacturing environment. The main objective of this planning system is to address one of the major characteristics of PCB assembly production -'Product Oriented Production' - by integrating product design into planning systems. Based on this planning system, EMS suppliers can effectively plan the required manufacturing resources, predict production cycle time and 'optimize' resource deployment for a particular product.;Furthermore, other characteristics of PCB assembly have been also incorporated into this planning system. For instance, in a PCB assembly line, unexpected stoppages are frequent and take a large portion of total operation time. Once a machine stops and is hampering production, operators need to come over and fix the issues immediately, if operators are available. For this scenario, the production rate does not only depend on the working speed of bottleneck machines. Actually, operator availability during machine failure for fixing the issues is another dominant factor and should be integrated in the planning system. In order to capture this resource interaction during production, a failure logic module was created and applied for modeling major pieces of equipment in an assembly line. The analysis obtained from case studies of this research shows that integrating this failure logic module is necessary and critical to ensure output results that are both reasonable and reliable.;In addition, the labor resource has been emphasized as an important factor in this research. The impacts of operator interference and performance differences among operators are incorporated into the prototype planning system. The significance of incorporating the impact of labor performance in a PCB production planning system is demonstrated in case studies.;In this research, the prototype planning system is generated based on the unique characteristics of PCB assembly production, which has not been well emphasized in previous literatures. For production planning of PCB assembly, product design, resource constraints during production and impacts from manual operations are the three major sources of uncertainties. In this research, these three factors have been fully addressed and subsequently integrated into the planning system. Consequently, the proposed system not only can generate robust and accurate prediction results, but also can provide the customized production solutions for each individual product and customer. Furthermore, the architecture of combining product design into the planning system can be valuable when applied to production scenarios characterized as 'product oriented' production, which is not limited to PCB assembly. |
