Electronics industry is a major part of modern manufacturing, and electronic systems play an increasingly important role in a majority of today's products. Electronic systems are usually implemented with printed circuit boards (PCBs), and, consequently, PCB assembly has become an important sector of the electronics manufacturing industry overall. However, operating effectively in this industry is becoming more difficult as the companies must compete with high quality standards, rapidly changing

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... technologies, short production cycles, and increasing product variety and complexity. In addition, the capital equipment cost of electronics assembly industry facilities are high in comparison to the usual turnover of a company. As a result, production planning decisions need to made more and more frequently due to continuous changes in the production conditions. In this work we discuss production planning in electronics assembly-and, in particular, in PCB assembly. Our intention is to identify the typical problems arising from production planning and to give a survey of the solution methods suggested in the literature. In addition to this theoretical perspective, we will briefly review applications designed for production planning in PCB assembly. This work is organized as follows: We begin with an introduction to flexible manufacturing systems in general and present a framework for production planning systems in Section 1. Next, we study the fundamentals of PCB assembly process in Section 2 and survey the relevant literature in Section 3. In Section 4 we review existing commercial applications for production planning, and in Section 5 study more closely one of these systems. Finally, in Section 6 we sum up the discussion and outline few important topics for the future research.