A TABU SEARCH APPROACH TO SCHEDULING AN AUTOMATED WET ETCH STATION

This paper addresses a production scheduling problem arising at the we t etching process in a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility. Mater ial handling capacity, material processing constraints, and mixed stor age policies are considered in formulating the problem as a flow shop sequencing problem with the objective of minimizing makespan (Cmax). E fficient heuristics and a tabu search procedure are developed to gener ate high-quality solutions in reasonable computational time. Extensive computational experiments evaluating the performance of the heuristic s are reported.