A case study on the multistage IC final testing scheduling problem with reentry

The integrated-circuit final testing scheduling problem (ICFTSP) with reentry is a variation of the complex flow-shop scheduling problem, which is also a generalization of the classical reentrant flow batch process problem, and the identical parallel machine problem. In this paper, we present a case study on the ICFTSP with reentry, which is taken from a final testing shop floor in an integrated circuit manufacturing factory. For the case investigated, the jobs are clustered by their product types, which must be processed on groups of parallel machines at various process stages following the manufacturing sequence, which must be completed before the due dates. The job processing time depends on the product type, and the machine setup time is sequentially dependent on the orders of jobs processed. The objective is to schedule jobs without violating all constraints, while the total machine workload is minimized. Since the ICFTSP has reentry characteristic, and involves job processing precedence, serial-processing stage, batch-processing stage, job clusters, job-cluster dependent processing time, due dates, machine capacity, and sequence dependent setup time, it is more difficult to solve than the classical flow-shop scheduling problem. We present three fast network algorithms to efficiently solve the ICFTSP with reentry and provide a performance comparison between the three algorithms on eight test problems.