A component reel arrangement problem

To assemble printed circuit boards, components are picked from a feeder which accommodates component reels. Given a processing sequence of the components for a PCB, finding the optimal arrangement of the component reels turns out to be a quadratic assignment problem. It often happens that, by allowing components to be duplicated in more than one feeder location, the total processing time can be reduced. We call this a "relaxed capacity problem". An algorithm is presented to solve the relaxed capacity problem and computational results on practical problems are shown.<>