A New Heuristic for PCBs Grouping Problem with Setup Times

In this paper, we present a new heuristic to divide a batch of printed circuit boards (PCBs) into subgroups to save the setup time for loading and unloading components from the assembly machine. In the heuristic, we propose several concepts about similarity to make the number of groups as few as possible. To better show the relationship between the PCB types and the component types of a group, we introduce a new solution representation. In addition, considering the characteristics of the PCBs grouping problem (PGP), a method for pairing PCBs is presented. With the PCB pairs, an iterative scheme is applied to start a new group. We try the rest PCBs one by one according to the similarity between it and the PCB group. Finally, the experiments and comparisons show the good performance of the proposed heuristic.