Flexible Job-shop Scheduling for Semiconductor Manufacturing with Hybrid Answer Set Programming (Extended Abstract)

Modern semiconductor manufacturing involves complex production processes with hundreds of operations from lot release to completion, which often takes several months. In contrast to abstract job-shop scheduling benchmarks, our work addresses the scheduling of realistic semiconductor manufacturing processes. We model their sophisticated requirements by hybrid Answer Set Programming and take advantage of difference logic for expressing machine processing, setup, and maintenance times. Unlike existing approaches that schedule semiconductor manufacturing processes locally by greedy heuristics or isolated optimization of specific machine groups, we explore the potential and limits of large-scale semiconductor fab scheduling.