Tailored Decomposition Procedures for Semiconductor Testing Facilities

Abstract

In Chapters 5 and 6, we presented generic workcenter-based decomposition procedures. Implementing these procedures in job shops and flow shops, as well as semiconductor testing facilities showed that they perform significantly better than dispatching rules. These experiments not only showed that this is a valid approach to problems of this kind, but also highlighted the critical elements of the procedure we need to improve on to make the procedure work even better. In this chapter, we combine the subproblem solution procedures developed in Chapters 7 and 8 with insights obtained from the experiments with the generic decomposition procedures in Chapters 5 and 6 to develop improved workcenter-based decomposition procedures for the semiconductor testing environment.