An improved imperialist competitive algorithm based photolithography machines scheduling
针对半导体制造中光刻机这一瓶颈设备，提出一种改进的帝国竞争算法，结合滚动时域策略和混合成本函数，以最小化总完工时间，并通过实验验证了其在缩短周期时间、提高准时交付率和设备利用率方面的优越性。
: Photolithography machine is one of the most expensive equipment in semiconductor manufacturing system, and as such is often the bottleneck for processing wafers. This paper focuses on photolithography machines scheduling with the objective of total completion time minimisation. In contrast to classic parallel machines scheduling, it is characterised by dynamical arrival wafers, re-entrant process flows, dedicated machine constraints and auxiliary resources constraints. We propose an improved imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) within the framework of a rolling horizon strategy for the problem. We develop a variable time interval-based rolling horizon strategy to decide the scheduling point. We address the global optimisation in every local scheduling by proposing a mixed cost function. Moreover, an adaptive assimilation operator and a sociopolitical competition operator are used to prevent premature convergence of ICA to local optima. A chaotic sequence-based local search method is presented to accelerate the rate of convergence. Computational experiments are carried out comparing the proposed algorithm with ILOG CPLEX, dispatching rules and meta-heuristic algorithms in the literature. It is observed that the algorithm proposed shows an excellent behaviour on cycle time minimisation while with a good on time delivery rate and machine utilisation rate.