A tabu search approach to scheduling an automated wet etch station

This paper addresses a production scheduling problem arising at the wet etching process in a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility. Material handling capacity, material processing constraints, and mixed storage policies are considered in formulating the problem as a flow shop sequencing problem with the objective of minimizing makespan (Cmax). Efficient heuristics and a tabu search procedure are developed to generate high-quality solutions in reasonable computational time. Extensive computational experiments evaluating the performance of the heuristics are reported.