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In the drilling process of printed circuit boards, achieving the operation with the least cost depends on the distance travelled by the drilling route. In this study, an integrated method is proposed to carry out the drilling process with the least cost and high speed. In the proposed method, the positions of electronic circuit elements to be placed on the printed circuit board are detected using image processing techniques on a two-dimensional circuit image. Annealing Simulation, Particle Swarm Optimization and Ant Colony Algorithms have been used to solve the travelling salesman problem, and their performances have been examined. When comparing the test results of the obtained models, it is observed that the Ant Colony Algorithm, at the same iteration values, provides solutions with significantly shorter route lengths compared to Simulated Annealing and Particle Swarm Optimization algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we address a production scheduling problem. The scheduling problem is encountered in a job-shop production type. The production system is discrete and dynamic system in which jobs arrive continually. We introduce a simulation model (SM) to identify several situations such as machine failures, changing due dates in which scheduling rules (SRs) should be selected independently. Three SRs, i.e. the earliest due date rule (EDD), the shortest processing time first rule (SPT) and the first in first out rule (FIFO), are incorporated in a SM. A simulated annealing heuristic (SA) based simulation-optimisation approach is proposed to identify the unknown schedules in the dynamical system. In the numerical analysis, the performance of SRs and SA are compared using the simulation experiments. The objective functions minimising the mean flowtime and the mean tardiness are examined with varying levels of shop utilization and due date tightness. As an overall result, we observe that the proposed SA heuristic outperforms EDD and FIFO, the well-known SPT rule provides the best results. However, SA heuristic achieves very close results to the SPT and offers a reasonable computational burden in time-critical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]