Large-Scale Scheduling with Routing, Batching and Release Dates for Wafer Fabs using Tabu Search

Abstract

Semiconductor fabricating facilities (wafer fabs) aim for manageable, heuristics that can reproducibly solve their typical large-scale dynamic complex job shop scheduling problems. Hence, the main contribution of this work is a deterministic tabu search algorithm that sequences, routes and batches the process operations of a continuous reentrant material flow using a large-scale mix of single, flexible (parallel) and batch machines. Due to continuous production, release dates and due dates are considered to minimize job tardiness. Using known large-scale benchmark instances, sixteen neighborhood structures are validated to find a practical compromise between solution quality and computational effort. The result is a novel combination of neighborhoods for simultaneous sequencing, routing and batching that finds good schedules for problem instances of industrial size and complexity in an acceptable time.