| This dissertation addresses the potential benefits of simultaneous generation of assembly planning and scheduling in electronics assembly operations. Assembly planning and scheduling are two major functions in circuit board manufacturing. Currently, assembly plans are developed in the absence of information about the state of the shop floor at the execution time of the assembly operations. As a result, these assembly plans may impose unnecessary restrictions on scheduling. Consequently, scheduling conflicts, bottlenecks, imbalance in assembly lines, machine congestion that lead to lateness, and excessive production and shipping costs are inevitable. This research compares the performance of the traditional method of isolated planning and scheduling, with a proposed method of simultaneous generation of assembly plans and schedules in electronic assembly operations. Simulated scenarios indicate the potential superiority of the integrated system. A software system, SAPS, is developed as an environment not only to test the idea of integration, but to generate all the plans and schedules simultaneously for any scenario for electronics assembly operations.; This research shows the benefit of one of the aspects of concurrent engineering in electronics manufacturing and demonstrates a methodology and the potential advantage of integration in manufacturing functions. |
