Multiple Orders Per Job Compatible Batch Scheduling

This paper investigates the problem of grouping different customer orders into jobs and these formed jobs to batches and scheduling them on a single batch processing machine to minimize the total weighted tardiness of orders. A compatible batching environment is considered in which there is no restriction on the orders being from the same family to be batched together. A mixed-integer program (MIP) is developed and tested. The compatible MIP model takes 1 + h, on average, to solve an instance. A new simulated annealing-based heuristic solves compatible problems to within 4% of optimality in a few minutes. This fast, near optimal performance suggests that these heuristics may be viable for implementation in practical manufacturing settings, such as burn-in operations in the back end of the semiconductor manufacturing process