Synopses & Reviews
This book outlines the results of a systematic, long-term research effort aimed at developing effective scheduling algorithms for complex manufacturing facilities. The book focuses on a specific industrial context, that of semiconductor manufacturing. The authors combine knowledge of the specific physical production system with the methods and results of previous scheduling research to develop effective, approximate solution procedures for scheduling problems. The decomposition methods developed in this book constitute a broad family of heuristic approaches to large, NP-hard scheduling problems which can be applied to other manufacturing environments in addition to semiconductor production manufacturing facilities. The results reported in this book indicate that properly designed decomposition methods can obtain significantly better schedules than the dispatching rules that currently form the core of industrial scheduling practice.
Table of Contents
Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. Industrial Context and Motivation for Decomposition Methods. 3. Review of Decomposition Methods for Factory Scheduling Problems. 4. Modelling Interactions Between Subproblems: The Disjunctive Graph Representation and Extensions. 5. Workcenter-Based Decomposition Procedures for the Classical Job Shop Environment. 6. A Generic Decomposition Procedure for Semiconductor Testing Facilities. 7. Time-Based Decomposition Procedures for Single-Machine Subproblems with Sequence-Dependent Setup Times. 8. Time-Based Decomposition Procedures for Parallel Machine Subproblems with Sequence-Dependent Setup Times. 9. Naive Rolling Horizon Procedures for Job Shop Scheduling. 10. Tailored Decomposition Procedures for Semiconductor Testing Facilities. 11. Computational Results for Job Shops with Single and Parallel Machine Workcenters. 12. The Effects of Subproblem Solution Procedures and Control Structures. 13. Conclusions and Future Directions. Author Index.