Controlling delivery performance in semiconductor manufacturing using Look Ahead Batching

With the advent of the Just-In-Time (JIT) manufacturing philosophy, scheduling problems with delivery performance have received significant attention in recent years. The JIT concept requires not only a penalty for lateness but also for earliness and therefore both early and tardy deliveries are highly discouraged. In this paper, the dynamic scheduling of a single batch processing machine has been addressed for controlling the delivery performance between earliness and tardiness measures. A Look Ahead Batching (LAB) strategy has been proposed. In LAB, the scheduling decisions are made considering the arrival epochs and due dates of the incoming lots, which are easily predictable in a computer-integrated manufacturing environment, especially in the semiconductor industry. LAB strategy is used to control the delivery performance, which involves a trade-off between the conflicting objectives of minimizing earliness- and tardiness-related measures simultaneously. The potential of LAB strategy in controlling delivery performance is demonstrated by an extensive simulation study.