Distributed scheduling based on due dates and buffer prioritization

The problem of scheduling a semiconductor manufacturing facility is addressed. Several buffer priority and due-date based scheduling policies for nonacyclic flow lines are studied. Not all buffer priority policies are stable, as is shown by a counterexample. However, the first buffer first serve and last buffer first serve policies are stable. Also, the earliest due data and least-slack policies are stable. For systems consisting of several nonacyclic flow lines, several stable buffer priority orderings are exhibited. Some simulation results on the performance of these policies are summarized