Agent-based interbay system control for a single-loop semiconductor manufacturing fab

Abstract

This study investigates agent-based interbay control of a wafer fabrication facility with a single-loop track. Doing so will simultaneously resolve the production scheduling and vehicle dispatching problems for an interbay over-hoist-transportation system which is commonly employed in the semiconductor manufacturing industry. Two issues are focused on in this study: (i) To design appropriate agent-based control architecture for an interbay system and (ii) to develop a coordination mechanism for the autonomous agents in the interbay system, so that wafer manufacturing tasks can be accomplished efficiently. In this study, we construct a distributed interbay system architecture, in which wafer cassettes, vehicles, and manufacturing cells with stockers are modelled as independent and autonomous agents. This study develops an agent coordination mechanism that is based on a vehicle-initiated contract net protocol. Three types of bidding strategies are proposed and empirically examined via simulation. The performances of the proposed agent-based control mechanism, in terms of cassette sojourn time and throughput, are observed and our experiments have shown promising results.

Keywords:

• Distributed control
• Interbay systems
• Agent-based systems
• Semiconductor manufacturing

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the valuable comments and suggestions of the anonymous referees. The authors would like thank to Tzu-Hua Hsu and Hun-Sung Go for their programming work in this study. Special thanks are also given to Prof. Dr. Ing.habil. Wilfried Sauer, Dipl.-Ing A. Paproth and S. Werner during the corresponding author's visit to TU Dresden. This work is partially supported by the National Science Council of the Republic of China.