Article ID: | iaor19992853 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 36 |
Issue: | 11 |
Start Page Number: | 3167 |
End Page Number: | 3181 |
Publication Date: | Nov 1998 |
Journal: | International Journal of Production Research |
Authors: | Avramidis Athanassios, Uzsoy Reha, Healy K.J. |
Keywords: | batch size |
Batch processing machines, where a number of jobs are processed simultaneously as a batch, occur frequently in semiconductor manufacturing environments, particularly at diffusion in wafer fabrication and at burn-in in final test. In this paper we consider a batch-processing machine subject to uncertain (Poisson) job arrivals. Two different cases are studied: (1) the processing times of batches are independent and identically distributed (IID), corresponding to a diffusion tube; and (2) the processing time of each batch is the maximum of the processing times of its constituent jobs, where the processing times of jobs are IID, modelling a burn-in oven. We develop computational procedures to minimize the expected long-run-average number of jobs in the system under a particular family of control policies. The control policies considered are threshold policies, where processing of a batch is initiated once a certain number of jobs have accumulated in the system. We present numerical examples of our methods and verify their accuracy using simulation.