Scheduling jobs with time constraints between consecutive process steps in semiconductor manufacturing

In this paper, we consider flow shop scheduling problems for jobs with time constraints between consecutive process steps. We start by analyzing different types of time constraints that arise in semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities. A simple heuristic that sequentially schedules the jobs in a list scheduling manner is proposed. Moreover, a decomposition approach based on mixed integer programming is developed. The two approaches are compared by means of randomly generated problem instances.