An Effective Scheduling Approach for Maximizing Polyimide Printing Weighted Throughput in Cell Assembly Factories

Polyimide printing (PI) is an important process operation but also often the cause of bottlenecks in capital-intensive cell assembly factories. Therefore, the development of an effective scheduling method to maximize throughput in this PI process is essential and difficult. In the polyimide printing scheduling problem (PISP), jobs are given weights and clustered by their product types, which must be processed on identical parallel PI machines. The setup times for two consecutive jobs between different product types in the PI machines are sequence-dependent. In this paper, the PISP is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming model. The PISP is also transformed into a multiple tour maximum collection problem (MTMCP), a well-known network problem which has been investigated extensively. Based on this transformation, one can therefore solve the PISP near-optimally using the efficient algorithm.