A nested branch and price approach to designing the circuit card assembly factory

Abstract

Industrial competition has placed a premium on prescribing the optimal design of a circuit card assembly factory. This problem is to prescribe the number of lines of each type, the line type to which each circuit card type is to be assigned and the machine that should place each component type that populates it. The primary objective is to minimize total cost. This thesis achieves five research objectives. It presents a realistic model of this design problem. It prescribes an optimal design using a nested branch-and-price approach. It then presents an extension of the model to address workload balancing. The thesis then develops an efficient solution technique to minimize the computational effort needed to balance workloads. Finally, it extends the deterministic models to address uncertainties related to workload and availability using chance constraints.