Evaluation of printed circuit board assembly manufacturing systems using fuzzy colored Petri nets

In this paper, implementation and evaluation of a printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) manufacturing system model based on fuzzy colored Petri nets (FCPN) modeling was performed. From the Petri nets simulation results, two contributions were claimed: (1) The successful application of our approach to evaluate systems that consist of complicated concurrent processes with embedded data structures and uncertainty reasoning. (2) An approach in automatic determination of the threshold values in the fuzzy production rules using FCPN. The details of the assembling processes and various manufacturing data were gathered from computer manufacturers located in China. Different resource allocation strategies were introduced in the experiments, and simulation results were obtained. The resources included screen printers, different pick and place machines, infrared soldering machines and component insertion robots. All the experiments were built by using the Petri net tool DESIGN/CPN. A number of hierarchy pages, color sets, places, arcs and transitions representing the PCBA and fuzzy production rules were constructed in the experiments. Simulation runs of the Petri nets model were carried out. The result shows that our approach could be used to guide decision-makers in the design and selection of a suitable PCBA manufacturing strategy. Future extension of our work is described.