Article ID: | iaor20091230 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 159 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 261 |
End Page Number: | 273 |
Publication Date: | Mar 2008 |
Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
Authors: | Mason Scott J., Jampani Jagadish |
Keywords: | scheduling, heuristics |
Front opening unified pods (FOUPs) are used to store and transport silicon wafers in 300-mm semiconductor wafer fabs. To achieve production efficiencies, wafers are grouped together in FOUPs without regard to the originating customer placing the order. In the resulting multiple orders per job (moj) scheduling problem, scheduling is performed at the FOUP (i.e., aggregated order) level, while scheduling performance is assessed per individual customer order. Column generation heuristics are presented for single and parallel machine moj scheduling problems to minimize total weighted order completion time. The proposed heuristics obtain nearoptimal solutions very quickly, outperforming competing approaches in the literature.