Scheduling Integrated Circuit Assembly Operations on Die Bonder

Solving the integrated circuit (IC) assembly scheduling problem (ICASP) is a very challenging task in the IC manufacturing industry. In the IC assembly factories, the jobs are assigned processing priorities and are clustered by their product types, which must be processed on groups of identical parallel machines. Furthermore, the job processing time depends on the product type, and the machine setup time is sequentially dependent on the orders of jobs processed. Therefore, the ICASP is more difficult to solve than the classical parallel machine scheduling problem. In this paper, we describe the ICASP in detail and formulate the ICASP as in integer programing problem to minimize the total machine workload. An efficient heuristic algorithm is also proposed for solving large-scale problems.