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An Improved Formulation for Scheduling an Automated Wet-etch Station by I.A. Karimi; Zerlinda Y.L. Tan; Swarnendu Bhushan is a Engineering article available to read on EtoBox.

What is An Improved Formulation for Scheduling an Automated Wet-etch Station about?

Wet-etching is a key step in wafer fabrication. An automated wet-etch process involves a complex interplay of zero wait and no-intermediatestorage policies, and a shared robot; and poses a challenging scheduling problem. In this paper, we reformulate a previously reported mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model for minimizing the makespan in an automated wet-etch station. Extensive numerical evaluation shows that the reformulations outperform their predecessors by a significant margin. Interestingly, this improvement in performance arises merely from a slightly redefined binary variable. We also present an effective empirical formula for ranking MILP models in a situation where assessing alternate models is difficult due to the absence of an outright winner, and problem-as well as machine-dependent relative performances of models.

Who reads An Improved Formulation for Scheduling an Automated Wet-etch Station?

Author

I.A. Karimi; Zerlinda Y.L. Tan; Swarnendu Bhushan

Publisher

Elsevier Science; Elsevier ; Elsevier Ltd.; Elsevier BV (ISSN 0098-1354)

Published

2004

Language

EN

Field

Engineering (Physical Sciences)