Column generation algorithms for the wafer-to-wafer integration problem

We consider the wafer-to-wafer integration problem that arises in the manufacturing of integrated circuits. We propose an exact, state-of-the-art branch-and-price optimization algorithm for this problem, and we derive a price-and-branch heuristic from this algorithm. We have implemented these two algorithms, as well as a simple sequential heuristic algorithms, and we have conducted extensive experiments to test their performance. The results allow us to establish the range of the size of the instances that can be solved to optimality by our branch-and-price algorithm. We also identify ranges of the different instance parameters for which the two heuristics perform relatively well.