Deterministic Scheduling Approaches

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe deterministic scheduling approaches for equipment (i.e., single machines), work centers, and full wafer fab situations. We start with simulation-based scheduling approaches that are somewhere between dispatching and scheduling. Then, we continue by presenting scheduling approaches for single machines. We especially focus on the case of a single batch machine with incompatible job families and the TWT objective. Furthermore, we study the problem of scheduling jobs on a single cluster tool with C max objective. Then, we present scheduling approaches for work centers, i.e., for parallel machines. We first study scheduling problems for parallel machines with sequence-dependent setup times and then cover parallel batch machines with incompatible job families and ready times of the jobs. After that, we present work that deals with the treatment of secondary resources. Then, we discuss multiple orders per job (MOJ) scheduling problems. We extend these work center approaches to the full wafer fab situation using the concept of disjunctive graphs. We discuss a modified shifting bottleneck heuristic for wafer fabs, and we also describe a distributed variant of the shifting bottleneck heuristic. Next, we extend the shifting bottleneck heuristic to multicriteria situations. We study the performance of these approaches in a rolling horizon setting using simulation models of wafer fabs.