A multi-criteria decision-making approach for capacity allocation problem in semiconductor fabrication

Abstract

In today's highly competitive environment, good customer relationship management is essential for a company to survive and to acquire reasonable profit. A semiconductor enterprise has multi-site fabs, and follows basically a make-to-order production type. The allocation of capacity for manufacturing different types of products is important for the competitiveness and future development of the enterprise. To cope with this requirement, a multi-criteria decision-making approach is proposed in this article for more efficient evaluation and selection of capacity allocation plans in semiconductor fabs. Under this approach, fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) is incorporated with fuzzy Delphi method (FDM), constraint programming (CP) and benefits, opportunities, costs and risks (BOCR). FDM is used to achieve a consensus among the opinions of experts. CP is used to screen out a set of capacity allocation plans that should be further evaluated. FANP with BOCR is used to evaluate the various factors and the interrelationship among the factors under the BOCR merits and to determine the expected performance of the capacity allocation plans. The proposed approach can provide a ranking and also priorities of different capacity allocation plans, and the fab can select the most appropriate capacity allocation for production in the case that insufficient capacity existed.

Keywords:

• capacity allocation
• semiconductor
• constraint programming
• fuzzy Delphi method
• fuzzy analytic network process

Acknowledgements

This study was supported in part by the National Science Council in Taiwan under Grant NSC 98-2410-H-167-008-MY3. We thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments, which improved the article.