Scheduling with product family set-up times: an application in TFT LCD manufacturing

The development of a scheduling methodology for module processing in thin film transistor liquid crystal display manufacturing is presented. The problem is a parallel machine-scheduling problem with family set-up times and due dates. Two objectives are considered: total tardiness and the number of family set-ups. Two heuristics are developed based on the MULTIFIT method and tabu search. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms give schedules that are very efficient in terms of both total tardiness and the number of family set-ups.