ACO-based scheduling for a single Batch Processing Machine in semiconductor manufacturing

This research is motivated by the scheduling problem in the diffusion and oxidation operations of semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities (fabs), where one machine is modeled as a single batch processing machine. The objective is to minimize the total weighted tardiness (TWT) on a single batch processing machine (BPM) with incompatible lot families and dynamic lot arrivals, with consideration on the sequence-dependent setup time. Since the problem is NP-hard, ant colony optimization (ACO) is used to achieve a satisfactory solution in a reasonable computation time. Extensive experiments have been implemented to validate and verify the proposed method. It is shown by the simulation results that the proposed method is superior to the common apparent tardiness cost- batched apparent tardiness cost (ATC-BATC) rule with smaller TWT and makespan, especially TWT that is improved by 40.07% on average.