Minimizing total earliness and tardiness on re-entrant batch processing machine with time windows

The time window (TW) generalizes the concept of due date. The semiconductor wafer fabrication system is currently one of the most complex production processes, which has typical re-entrant batch processing machine (RBPM). RBPM is a bottleneck. This paper addresses a scheduling of RBPM with job-dependent TWs. According to a general modelling, an improved and new job-family-oriented modelling of the decomposition method that is based on the slack mixed integer linear programming is proposed. First, the complicated scheduling problem of RBPM is divided into sub-problems, which are executed circularly. Then, each one consists of updating, sequencing and dispatching. The objective is to minimize the total earliness and tardiness for job-dependent TWs. In order to evaluate the proposed modelling, the experiments are implemented on the real-time scheduling simulation platform and optimization toolkit ILOG CPLEX. The results show that the improved modelling obtains better solutions in less computation time.