An optimised dynamic bottleneck dispatching policy for semiconductor wafer fabrication

Abstract

A dynamic bottleneck dispatching (DBD) policy is designed in this paper to detect bottlenecks in a timely way and make adaptive dispatching decisions of semiconductor wafer fabrication systems according to the real-time conditions. Control parameters of the proposed DBD algorithm are optimised by response surface methodology (RSM) and desirability functions. Numerical results show that DBD outperforms common scheduling rules such as CR + FIFO, EDD, SRPT, SPT, SPNB and an existing dynamic bottleneck dispatching method.

Keywords:

• dynamic bottleneck dispatching (DBD)
• semiconductor wafer fabrication system (SWFS)
• response surface methodology (RSM)
• simulation optimisation

Acknowledgements

The work described in this paper was supported by Research Grant from National Natural Science Foundation of China (50475027), Specialised Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (20040248052), and National Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of CHINA (2006AA04Z128).