The Efficient Drilling of Printed Circuit Boards

A Greek manufacturer of printed circuit boards achieved a significant improvement in the performance of a programmable drilling machine by using a traveling salesman heuristic. Most of the development work was carried out on the company’s small personal computer using BASIC. In order to tackle larger drilling tasks and to facilitate the input process, the BASIC program was translated into machine code and a drilling machine-computer interface was designed, leading finally to the manufacture of a drilling optimization device.