Title: Integrated heuristics for scheduling multiple order jobs in a complex job shop

Authors: Jagadish Jampani, Edward A. Pohl, Scott J. Mason, Lars Monch

Addresses: Dept of Industrial Engineering, University of Arkansas, 4207 Bell Engineering Center, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA. ' Dept of Industrial Engineering, University of Arkansas, 4207 Bell Engineering Center, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA. ' Dept of Industrial Engineering, University of Arkansas, 4207 Bell Engineering Center, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA. ' Dept of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Hagen, 58097 Hagen, Germany

Abstract: Scheduling in semiconductor manufacturing involves numerous types of complexities, including assignment of orders to front-opening unified pods (FOUPs), assignment of FOUPs to batches, and batch processing on single or parallel machines in multiple tool-groups with re-entrant flows. Based on these features, wafer fabrication in semiconductor manufacturing is referred to as a complex job shop in the literature. Assignment of multiple customer orders to jobs/FOUPs and scheduling them in a complex job shop environment is labelled as MOJ-CJSSP (multiple orders per job complex job shop scheduling problem). In this paper, we present constraint programming (CP), ant colony optimisation (ACO), and integrated CP-ACO approaches to minimise the sum of weighted completion times of the orders in MOJ-CJSSP.

Keywords: job shop scheduling; constraint programming; ant colony optimisation; ACO; metaheuristics; hybrid algorithms; multiple order jobs; semiconductor manufacturing; wafer fabrication.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMHEUR.2010.034204

International Journal of Metaheuristics, 2010 Vol.1 No.2, pp.156 - 180

Published online: 19 Jul 2010 *

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