The measurement of meaning

House of Quality

On the truck dispatching problem

The vehicle routing problem

Research in closed-loop supply chains (CLSCs) has grown rapidly over the last 10 years. The authors offer a critical review of influential CLSC research that takes a business economics perspective. Much of the research was inspired by practice-driven thoughtpieces, and this helped to keep research focused on relevant issues. However, CLSC research has several assumptions, such as perfect substitution between new and remanufactured products that risk becoming institutionalized. There is a strong need to carefully examine current industrial practice so that research remains focused on relevant problems. Deeper understanding of consumer perceptions of remanufactured products, product diffusion, and valuation of returned products are needed for the field to continue to add insights into developing sustainable economies.

Production and Operations Management

Due to the high capital investment cost in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, strategic capacity planning plays an important role in improving business performance. The reasons that make these problems especially difficult are: the complex fabrication process, rapid changes in technology and products, the long lead time and the high cost of capacity increment, and the high uncertain demand and capacity. Hence, a review of the existing solutions to capacity planning to cope with these difficulties is important for developing new methodologies and practices. In this paper, we provide a review of the current research and fundamental methods in strategic capacity planning, identify emerging methods for capacity planning, and take an in-depth look at future research interests.

A review on strategic capacity planning for the semiconductor manufacturing industry

Scheduling of a semiconductor wafer fabrication system (SWFS) is complicated due to its re-entrant product flow, high uncertainties in operations, and rapidly changing products and technologies; thus dispatching rules have been widely used for real-time scheduling because they can provide a very quick and pretty good solution. However, deciding how to select appropriate rules is very difficult and seldom tackled. This paper describes an approach into the evaluation and optimization of dispatching rules by integrating the simulation and response surface methodology (RSM). In order to implement the proposed approach, a dynamic bottleneck dispatching (DBD) policy is designed, in which bottlenecks are detected in a timely way and adaptive dispatching decisions are made according to the real-time conditions. In addition, two case studies are carried out to demonstrate the approach. One case compares DBD to regular rules, such as CR + FIFO, EDD, SRPT, SPT, SPNB and Justice, a bottleneck dispatching method. Simulation results show that the DBD policy is superior to the other six methods. In another case study, the parameters of DBD are optimized by RSM and desirability function, and the result proves that the optimized DBD method can get even better performance.

Simulation-based optimization of dispatching rules for semiconductor wafer fabrication system scheduling by the response surface methodology

Home health care (HHC) is defined as providing medical and paramedical services for patients at their own domicile. In the HHC industry, it is crucial for health care organisations to assign caregivers to patients and devise reasonable visiting routes to save total operational cost and improve the service quality. However, some special constraints make the problem hard to solve. For example, patients’ service times are usually stochastic due to their varying health conditions; caregivers are organised in a hierarchical structure according to their skills to satisfy patients’ demands. In this paper, we address a HHC scheduling and routing problem with stochastic service times and skill requirements. A stochastic programming model with recourse is proposed to formulate the problem in which the expected penalty for late arrival at customers is considered. To solve the problem, it is equivalently transformed into a master problem and a pricing sub-problem. A column generation algorithm is developed to solve t...

Zhibin Jiang

Papers

A review on strategic capacity planning for the semiconductor manufacturing industry

Simulation-based optimization of dispatching rules for semiconductor wafer fabrication system scheduling by the response surface methodology

A branch-and-price algorithm for the home health care scheduling and routing problem with stochastic service times and skill requirements

Two-phase heuristic algorithms for full truckloads multi-depot capacitated vehicle routing problem in carrier collaboration

An ontology-based hierarchical semantic modeling approach to clinical pathway workflows