Estimating the operation time of flexible surface mount placement machines

摘要

Gantry type component placement machines are widely used in electronics industry due to their accuracy, speed and flexibility. In order to make optimal plans of their usage one has to know the manufacturing time of a given component placement work before the actual processing. This presupposes the use of a reliable machine simulator. In the present article, discrete-event simulation is applied to predict component placement times of gantry type machines. The generic simulator model is based on a circumstantial analysis of the time factors by the means of observing and measuring the times of operations performed by the machine. As a result of this, very high accuracy is achieved; the operation times predicted by the simulator are for a particular machine type (Universal Instruments GC-60D) in range ±1 % from the observed operation times.