Long cycle times in semiconductor manufacturing represent an increasing challenge for the industry and lead to a growing need for breakthrough approaches to reduce it. Small lot sizes and the conversion of batch processes to mini-batch or single-wafer processes are widely regarded as a promising...

This paper presents a brief overview of semiconductor manufacturing followed by the results of a panel session held at the Fourth International Conference on Modeling and Analysis of Semiconductor Manufacturing (MASM) in Miami, December 10, 2008 on the role of modelling and analysis in...

A semiconductor supply network involves many expensive steps, which have to be executed to serve global markets. The complexity of global capacity planning combined with the large capital expenditures to increase factory capacity makes it important to incorporate optimization methodologies for...

We present a new hybrid approach to interactive evolutionary multi-objective optimization that uses a partial preference order to act as the fitness function in a customized genetic algorithm. We periodically send solutions to the decision maker (DM) for her evaluation and use the resulting...

This research proposes two heuristics and a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to find non-dominated solutions to multiple-objective unrelated parallel machine scheduling problems. Three criteria are of interest, namely: makespan, total weighted completion time, and total weighted tardiness. Each heuristic...

Ambulance diversion (AD) is used by emergency departments (EDs) to relieve congestion by requesting ambulances to bypass the ED and transport patients to another facility. We study optimal AD control policies using a Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation that minimizes the average time that...

This study considers decisions in workforce management assuming individual workers are inherently different as measured by general cognitive ability (GCA). A mixed integer programming (MIP) model that determines different staffing decisions (i.e., hire, cross-train, and fire) in order to...