The impact of the qual-run requirements of APC on the scheduling performance in semiconductor manufacturing

This research is motivated by the qual-run requirements of Advance Process Control(APC) opposite setups of scheduling in semiconductor manufacturing. The objective is to analyze the impact of the qual-run requirements of APC on the scheduling performance (e.g. the Total Weighted Tardiness (TWT) and makespan)with a number of experiments. Taking parallel machines for example, we propose an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm to reach a satisfactory solution in a reasonable computation time under both scenarios of with or without consideration on the qual-run requirements of APC to do the evaluation. It is shown by the simulation results that the qual-run requirements of APC have important impact on the scheduling performance. The total average improvements on TWT and makespan are 15.38% and 10.21%, respectively, of the ACO solution with consideration on the qual-run requirements of APC comparing to the ACO solution without consideration on the qual-run requirements of APC. In addition, the more scheduled lots and more recipes on one machine, the stronger the impact of the qual-run requirements of APC is.