An approach to improve the drilling sequencing in printed circuit boards

Authors

Abstract

Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) are essential components in electronic devices. Among the manufacturing steps, drilling is one of the most time-consuming, typically performed by computer numerical control (CNC) machines. This paper presents an improvement approach to reduce drilling time by optimizing the CNC toolpath after each tool change. The goal is to minimize the total tool displacement through an optimized drilling sequence. An integer linear programming model and two heuristic methods are proposed for sequence generation. Computational experiments on instances derived from PCB layouts demonstrate that the heuristics are more effective for instances with more than 10 similar holes, achieving toolpaths up to 18.89% shorter and processing times at least 544 times faster than the mathematical model within a fixed time limit. The results indicate that low-complexity optimization techniques can enhance production efficiency in PCB manufacturing.

Author Biographies

Lucas William Zimmer, Instituto Federal de Santa Catarina (IFSC)

Bacharel em Engenharia de Controle e Automação pelo Instituto Federal de Santa Catarina, câmpus Chapecó.

Carise Elisane Schmidt, Instituto Federal de Santa Catarina

Licenciatura em Matemática

Mestrado em Modelagem Matemática

Doutorado em Métodos Numéricos em Engenharia

 

Published

2026-04-07