Spring Quarter 1998

ME/IE 8773-8774

Machine Scheduling in
Liquid Crystal Display Manufacturing

by

Chung-Yee Lee, Ph.D.
Rockwell Professor
Department of Industrial Engineering
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843-3131
Wednesday, April 8, 1998
3:35 p.m. UNITE Channel A
Room 108 Mechanical Engineering
Refreshments available in 136 Old EE after seminar

The machine scheduling problem of the polyimide process in liquid crystal display manufacturing will be presented. This is a new class of scheduling problems since each job has a distinct requirement for the polyimide chemical as well as the width of cell gap which is determined by the diameter of the spacer. The setup time depends on the polyimide chemicals used between two consecutive jobs as well as the diameters of the spacers used in these two jobs. Our purpose is to sequence job s so that the completion time of all jobs is minimized. In this talk, we present a new method that improves the current approach by providing an O(nlogn) algorithm, call it MATCHING, to sequence the jobs optimally under the assumption that all jobs with the same pplyimide chemicals need to be processed consecutively. We then study the problem by solving an assignment problem and combining it with an O(nlogn) MERGE algorithm. We show that this improves completion time significantly for a wide range of c onditions.

Dr. Chung-Yee Lee is the Rockwell Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Texas A&M University. Before joining Texas A&M University in 1996, he was a faculty member in the Department of Industrial and Sy stems Engineering at the University of Florida. In 1995-1996, he was a visiting professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His expertise is in the area of production scheduling and operations management and their applications in manufacturing. D r. Lee received his Bachelor degree in Electronic Engineering (1972) and a Master degree in Management Sciences (MBA Program) (1976) from National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan. He received a Master degree in Industrial Engineering/Management Science f rom Northwestern University in 1980 and his Ph.D. degree in Operations Research from Yale University in 1984. He is the Editor for IIE Transactions on Scheduling and Logistics, Area Editor for the Journal of Production and Operations Management and an As sociate Editor for the Journal of Manufacturing Systems.

Informal Faculty Luncheon: Wednesday, April 8, 1998, 12:00 noon, Room 402, Campus Club. Prof. Benjaafar will be the host at today's lunch with Prof. Lee.