Single-machine scheduling with advanced process control constraints

With increasing worldwide competition, high technology manufacturing companies have to take great care to lower their production costs and guarantee high quality at the same time. Advanced process control (APC) is widely used in semiconductor manufacturing to adjust machine parameters so as to achieve satisfactory product quality. When there is a conflict between quality and scheduling objectives, quality usually takes precedence. This paper studies the interaction between scheduling and APC. A singlemachine multiple-job-types makespan problem with APC constraints is proved to be NP-hard. For some special cases, optimal solutions are obtained analytically. In more general cases, the structure of optimal solutions is explored. An efficient heuristic algorithm based on these structural results is proposed and compared to an integer programming approach. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010.