Title: Tabu Search methods for scheduling a burn-in oven with non-identical job sizes and secondary resource constraints

Authors: Chandra Sen Mazumdar, M. Mathirajan, R. Gopinath, A.I. Sivakumar

Addresses: Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India. ' Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India. ' Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India. ' School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, 50 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 639 798, Singapore

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the problem of scheduling semiconductor burn-in operation, where the burn-in oven is modelled as a batch processing machine. In this study, both oven capacity and the number of boards available are taken as constraints. The objective measure of the problem is minimising the total completion time of all jobs. The computational difficulty in getting optimal solution is shown empirically. Since the problem under study is NP-hard, two variants of Tabu Search method are proposed. A series of computational experiments show that the proposed variants of Tabu Search method outperforms the existing heuristic for most system configurations in very meagre CPU times on P4 machine.

Keywords: batch processing machines; burn-in oven; scheduling; secondary resource constraints; Tabu search; total completion time; job sizes; resource constraints; operational research; semiconductor manufacturing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2008.016157

International Journal of Operational Research, 2008 Vol.3 No.1/2, pp.119 - 139

Published online: 07 Dec 2007 *

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