Application a heuristic approach to minimization of total weighted earliness and tardiness on a single burn-in oven

Abstract

This research considers the scheduling problem of minimizing the total weighted earliness and tardiness on a single burn-in oven in semiconductor manufacturing. Generally, the burn-in oven is a batch processing machine which processes several jobs simultaneously. A genetic algorithm is applied to this scheduling problem in order to find the optimal number of batches as well as an optimal job sequence under the assumption that the number of batches has not been determined a priori. In this research, all jobs are assumed initially available and have their own weights. The performances of several different approaches are also investigated and compared with that of the genetic algorithm approach. Numerical examples reveal that the genetic algorithm approach provides moderately good performance with respect to the measure of minimizing total weighted earliness and tardiness. © ICIC International 2011.