An application of incremental scheduling to a cluster photolithography tool

• Main Authors: Ware, Simon, Su, Rong
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering; Schedulin; Cluster
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/141780
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Optimization is an important area of research. As many optimization problems are NP-Hard it is important to have a wide selection of heuristic approaches to choose from when solving problems. Prioritized planning is a technique traditionally used to solve the multi-robot path planning problem. In this paper we investigate how incremental scheduling, a technique based upon prioritized planning can be applied to scheduling wafer processing in a cluster tool. For our test case our approach is shown to be capable of finding a plan of equal quality to other scheduling approaches and thus suggests our method could be of potential use in other manufacturing/material handling applications.