Composite Dispatching Rule Design for Photolithography Area Scheduling in Wafer Manufacturing System with Multiple Objectives

This paper investigates the photolithography area scheduling problem in wafer fabrication system, with the objective of simultaneously optimizing multiple performance measures. It has been known that photolithography area is usually the bottleneck work center of a wafer fab, and the scheduling problem in this area plays a significant role in improving the performance of the fab. Most studies of this problem have been focusing on only single objective. Therefore an approach for composite dispatching rule design is proposed to tackle this problem with multiple objectives, and the composite dispatching rule is a linear combination of several elementary dispatching rules with relative weights. Results demonstrate that the composite dispatching rule achieved a great improvement on every objective, compared to the performance of single elementary dispatching rule.