Title: Minimising makespan for a two-machine, flow shop, single-wafer-processing, multiple-jobs-per-carrier scheduling problem

Authors: Subhash C. Sarin; Lixin Wang; Ming Cheng

Addresses: Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061, USA. ' Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061, USA. ' Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061, USA

Abstract: In this paper, we address a two-machine flow shop scheduling problem in which a given set of jobs, each consisting of a number of wafers, is to be configured in the given number of carriers of limited capacity for transferring the wafers, and then, processing the wafers one-at-a-time on the machines, in order to minimise the makespan. First, we consider a relaxation of this problem by converting it to a two-machine flow shop lot streaming problem, in which the lot consists of all the jobs, and it is split into continuous-sized sublots for transferring in uncapacitated carriers. We separately address instances in which all the wafers of a job require either identical or different ratios of processing times on the machines. Several methods are developed for the solution of this problem. Results of our numerical experimentation reveal the efficacy of these methods in obtaining almost-optimal solutions within a few seconds of CPU time for the testbed of problem instances used.

Keywords: flow shop scheduling; single wafer processing; multiple jobs per carrier; lot streaming; makespan; two-machine scheduling; wafer fabrication.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPS.2012.050126

International Journal of Planning and Scheduling, 2012 Vol.1 No.3, pp.171 - 208

Received: 17 Jan 2012
Accepted: 05 Jun 2012

Published online: 29 Oct 2014 *

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