Real-time scheduling for reentrant hybrid flow shops: A decision tree based mechanism and its application to a TFT-LCD line

A reentrant hybrid flow shop, typically found in the electronics industry, is an extended system of the ordinary flow shop in such a way that there exist one or more parallel machines at each serial stage and each job has the reentrant product flow, i.e., a job may visit a stage several times. Among the operational issues in reentrant hybrid flow shops, we focus on the scheduling problem that determines the allocation of jobs to the machines at each stage as well as the sequence of the jobs assigned to each machine. Unlike the theoretical approach on reentrant hybrid flow shop scheduling, we suggest a real-time scheduling mechanism with a decision tree when selecting appropriate dispatching rules. The decision tree, one of the commonly used data mining techniques, is adopted to eliminate the computational burden required to carry out simulation runs to select dispatching rules. To illustrate the mechanism suggested in this study, a case study was performed on a thin film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) manufacturing line and the results are reported for various system performance measures.

Research highlights
► A real-time scheduling mechanism with the decision tree is suggested.
► The decision tree can be used for real-time scheduling for reentrant hybrid flow shops.
► The decision tree based real-time scheduling mechanism works well for the case of TFT-LCD manufacturing line.