Scheduling Jobs on Batch Machines Based on Ant Colony Algorithms

Scheduling jobs on batch machines has a significant impact on the performance indicators utilization. We used ant colony algorithms to improve performance of the scheduling jobs on batch machines in the semiconductor fabrication with multi-priority orders. To minimize total tardiness penalty, the improved ant colony algorithms was used to perform batches forming and batches sorting respectively, which are the two sub-problem of batch machines' scheduling. The simulation results show that the scheduling performance by our proposed algorithm is better than the heuristic rules, and the more percentage of emergency orders, the better it is.