My first job after university on the early 90s was working on an optimiser for through-hole p&p machines. It was an interesting problem. We took a gerber file a

My first job after university on the early 90s was working on an optimiser for through-hole p&p machines. It was an interesting problem. We took a gerber file and a BOM and generated (hopefully) optimal instructions for the machine. To minimise assembly time you need to keep the placement heads moving along the shortest paths in three dimensions. But you don't want them to collide with each other (I recall the machines I was concerned with had 2 (or maybe 4?) heads) or with components already placed. You also don't want a feeder to swap cartridges unnecessarily. Balancing all those concerns was very tricky. On the occasions that I went to the assembly plant, watching the placement heads moving always reminder me of the knife-trick scene in Aliens.