Electronic equipment test unit optimization

Given is a production line for a range of electronic equipment units. The final stations in this production line consist of testing stages (both mechanical/ electrical and computerized testing). In those testing stages different circuit boards are assembled together into test assembly-units. The test assembly-units do not in general, correspond to the final product units. The number of possible test assembly-units is large. The production line management is concerned with the number of test assembly-units and the levels of inventories of the individual circuits which remain in the testing stages of the production line and are not assembled in the final products. In this paper a case study is presented in which solutions to the assembly problem are gradually developed and tested on actual data. Linear programming is the basic modeling tool followed by an ad hoc integer rounding procedure. The computational results indicate that the solution scheme developed produces near optimal testing configurations. When examined by the line managers the proposed solutions were judged to produce a considerable improvement in the efficiency of the testing stages as compared with present practice.