Scheduling policies in multi-product manufacturing systems with sequence-dependent setup times

Multi-product production systems with sequence-dependent setup times are typical in manufacturing of semiconductor chips and other electronic products. In such systems, the scheduling policies to coordinate the production of multiple product types play an important role. In this paper, we study a multi-product manufacturing system with finite buffers, sequence-dependent setup times and various scheduling policies. Using continuous time Markov chain models, we evaluate the performance of such systems under seven scheduling policies, i.e., cyclic, shortest queue, shortest processing time, shortest overall time (including setup time and processing time), longest queue, longest processing time, and longest overall time. The impact of these policies on systemthroughput are compared, and the conditions characterizing the superiority of each policy are investigated. The results of this work can provide production engineers and supervisors practical guidance to operate multi-product manufacturing systems with sequence-dependent setups.