Scheduling for a flow shop with waiting time constraints and missing operations in semiconductor manufacturing

Abstract

Semiconductor manufacturing systems consist of highly complex and constrained processes owing to the requirement for high-quality wafers and dynamic customer orders. This study focuses on waiting time constraints to achieve high-quality wafers, with missing operations, to manufacture different types of orders, which are common scheduling requirements in semiconductor manufacturing systems. Waiting time constraints limit the waiting times between consecutive machines. Although sequential steps are modelled as a flow shop, some jobs can skip some steps in the flow shop. Such jobs can accordingly skip certain machines in the flow shop, which is called ‘missing operations’. This research investigates a scheduling problem for a flow shop with waiting time constraints and missing operations. A mathematical programming formulation and scheduling algorithms are proposed to operate such a flow shop efficiently. Through computational experiments, the proposed algorithms were evaluated, and analysis of various parameters for waiting time constraints and missing operations was conducted.