An effective search strategy for wafer fabrication scheduling with uncertain process requirements

We can decide the operation order with unknown potential order requirements using the scheduling architecture proposed in the paper. First, the branch-and-bound search based on a Markov chain method is proposed. The Markov chain gets the service rate records and arrival rate records from the manufacturing execution system. We can get the possible beginning times of operations for each job via the Markov chain. The information of the possible beginning time can help us to approximate the solution space. Thus, by the information of the possible beginning times of operations, a branch-and-bound search scheduler can be used to find a sub-optimal scheduling.