An interactive scheduler for a wafer probe centre in semiconductor manufacturing

This paper analyses production operations and scheduling constraints on a wafer probe centre in semiconductor manufacturing. Such actions as lot split and hot lot preemption are discussed. Due to the combinatorial difficulties of scheduling problems with sequence-dependent setup costs and multiple criteria, a human–computer interactive scheduler named the ‘interactive computer aided scheduling system’ (ICASS) is proposed. This ICASS can search for schedules to achieve a specific performance level set by a human. An experiment was conducted on a wafer probe centre to compare the performance of ICASS with that of a manual approach and six priority rules. The results indicate that ICASS spent less scheduling time and provided better schedules than the manual approach. All the six priority rules yielded only poor schedules with unbalanced performance in three kinds of criteria, although they were beneficial in computation time.