Populating printed circuit boards with components on a pick-and-place variant set-up is provided. Each set-up includes a number of components, stocks of which are brought to setting-up tables on the pick-and-place line, and a set-up family is associated with each set-up, the family system, a fixed set-up and multiple printed circuit board types which can be populated using the set-up. The fixed set-up is optimized with respect to a weighted parameter, before determining, by means of a simulation, how well variant set-ups, with which the remaining components of predefined pick-and-place orders are associated, can be implemented on the setting-up tables and brought to the pick-and-place line. The quality of each different weighting is determined in order to determine an optimized weighting.