A Generation and Repair Approach to Scheduling Semiconductor Packaging Facilities Using Case-based Reasoning

As the demand for multi-chip products with high capacity and small size increases, semiconductor packaging facilities have been faced with complicated constraints such as re-entrant flows, sequence dependent setups, and alternative routes, which leads to difficulties in scheduling semiconductor manufacturing operations. Furthermore, due to the frequent variations in the relative importance between objectives as well as the variabilities in initial setup status, available machines, and production requirements, practitioners are obliged to obtain a schedule within a short amount of computation time. In this paper, we propose a novel two-phase framework that aims to quickly produce a schedule of semiconductor packaging facilities by using case-based reasoning for minimizing the weighted sum of machine loss time and waiting time of jobs. Specifically, in the case generation phase, a case database is constructed by solving case scheduling problems using an existing solver. The case reasoning phase is responsible for repairing operation type sequences in the cases to produce a schedule for an unseen scheduling problem whose production requirements, available machines, initial setup status, and weight between performance measures are different from those of cases. The extensive experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach requires a short computation time similar to the rule-based methods while maintaining the quality of the schedules comparable to that of the existing metaheuristics.