A new dynamic look-ahead scheduling procedure for batching machines

The management of batching machines has raised a wide interest among researchers and practitioners in the recent years. The problem lies in that, whenever less than a full load is queuing at a batching machine, production planners have to decide whether to start processing the incomplete load or to wait for additional jobs. This paper proposes a new procedure for scheduling several products on parallel batching machines. This new procedure, motivated by shop floor control in semiconductor manufacturing, has been developed and tested by means of a simulation model of a re-entrant flow-manufacturing environment, which allows multiple loops along the job routings. The proposed procedure is shown to yield a better performance than the actual industrial practice from the point of view of flow-time-related indexes without adversely affecting the system's utilization rate.