Article ID: | iaor20084405 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 3 |
Issue: | 1/2 |
Start Page Number: | 119 |
End Page Number: | 139 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2008 |
Journal: | International Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Mathirajan M., Gopinath R., Sivakumar Appa Iyer, Mazumdar Chandra Sen |
Keywords: | heuristics: tabu search, manufacturing industries |
In this paper, we consider the problem of scheduling semiconductor burn-in operation, where the burn-in oven is modelled as a batch processing machine. In this study, both oven capacity and the number of boards available are taken as constraints. The objective measure of the problem is minimising the total completion time of all jobs. The computational difficulty in getting optimal solution is shown empirically. Since the problem under study is NP-hard, two variants of Tabu Search method are proposed. A series of computational experiments show that the proposed variants of Tabu Search method outperform the existing heuristic for most system configurations in very meagre CPU times on P4 machine.