Feeder Allocation Policy for a Turret Head Placement Machine Using Dynamic Programming

Abstract

The first objective of this thesis is to determine a feeder carriage allocation policy for a turret head placement machine. The feeder allocation problem deals with determining which component types have to be allocated to the surplus slots of the feeder carriage of the placement machine, so as to minimize the number of replenishments. The feeder allocation problem has been formulated as a dynamic programming model which maximizes the number of boards that can be made by a single allocation of component reels to the feeder slots. It has also been shown that maximizing the number of boards that can be made by a single allocation of components, delays replenishment as much as possible, thereby decreasing the total number of replenishments required.

As a second objective, a methodology of solving optimization problems with spreadsheets is proposed. This technique is called spreadsheet based optimization. The methodology is illustrated by considering the component allocation problem for a turret head placement machine.