The "Traveling Salesman" principle, which has its origin in logistics, is becoming more and more important in the marking of printed circuit boards (PCBs). It reduces the cycle time of a production line and thus lowers the cost per workpiece.
In general, the cycle time plays a major role in all lines, as the entire line time has a strong influence on the cost per workpiece. Therefore, it is important to carefully synchronize all units of a line. It is obvious on which machine the focus of an optimization is placed - as a rule, machines with the longest cycle time are focused first. As traceability plays an ever increasing role and thus marking of single printed circuit boards is effected more often than individual panel edge codes are applied, significant attention is now being paid on the cycle time optimization of marking systems and reader units.
This task faces the Rommel GmbH in a variety of ways. As a matter of course we are constantly working on the improvement of our process components; however, an optimization of these components generally leads to increasing costs. For this reason, the software team of Rommel GmbH continuously works on the enhancement of software processes. The issue of run time has been pursued for years. For a long time it has been possible to create the process positions according to various optimization strategies when creating new programs. These include the definition of the positions in lines/columns, meander tracks and recently also the "Traveling Salesman" procedure.
The "Traveling Salesman" procedure has its origin in logistics: how can the traveling salesman visit all his customers while traveling the shortest distance. Analogous to this, this task is also faced when driving to different code positions on a printed circuit board. A shorter travel path leads to a shorter "travel time" and thus to an improvement of the entire cycle time of the machine. However, as is the case with traveling salesmen, not only the way is decisive, but also other conditions have to be taken into account. Besides obvious "compulsory positions" such as inflow/outlet, our procedure also considers process-related things such as fiducials and code sequences when reporting the trace data to the MES of our customers. The optimization of the cycle time is thus effected by the machine itself without having a negative impact on other aspects of the entire process.
