Production Scheduling in Complex Job Shops from an Industry 4.0 Perspective: A Review and Challenges in the Semiconductor Industry

On the one hand, Industrie 4.0 has recently emerged as the keyword for increasing productivity in the 21st century. On the other hand, production scheduling in a Complex Job Shop (CJS) environment, such as wafer fabrication facilities, has drawn interest of researchers dating back to the 1950s [65, 18]. Although both research areas overlap, there seems to be very little interchange of ideas. This review presents and assesses production scheduling techniques in complex job shops from an Industrie 4.0 perspective. Based on the literature review, the authors’ experience in the semiconductor industry and feedback and discussions with industry experts, this paper identifies challenges in production control. We identify four future directions: Decentralization and autonomous decisions, flexibility and adaptability, integration and networking and human aspects in an environment with rising complexity. While this review and certain challenges are motivated by semiconductor fabrication plants, the paper serves as a general overview of the state-of-the-art in job shop scheduling. ∗corresponding author Experts from the companies Infineon Technologies AG and Elmos Semiconductor AG. CCS Concepts •Applied computing → Multi-criterion optimization and decision-making; Computer-aided manufacturing; Industry and manufacturing; •Computing methodologies → Machine learning;