Abstract
Manufacturers of Thin-Film Transistor Liquid Crystal Display (TFT-LCD) have been recently faced with intense global competition and declining profit. They improve productivity and competitiveness by reducing cycle time, increasing equipment utilization, integrating supply chain, and planning facility setups. This study develops an Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) system for 4.5th generation Color Filter (CF) fabs with the use of Microsoft Visual Basic for Application (VBA). The APS system considers the difference between orders and limited to assign orders to production lines automatically according to process characteristics, while balancing equipment loading. Tabu-Search (TS) and Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithms were applied to the APS system to optimize scheduling problems. Experimental results showed that APS effectively completes the scheduling and saves approximately 75% of working time. Moreover, these algorithms can effectively save about 15% of the changeover waste and decrease the number of over-capacity days compared with the original APS.