Production control in semiconductor manufacturing with time constraints

A sampling-based approach for managing lot release in time constraint tunnels in semiconductor manufacturing

“…The notion of time constraint strictly speaking is not conventional and can be found in the literature under different denominations, namely queue time or process queue time (Wu, Lin, and Chien 2012;Kobayashi, Kuno, and Arima 2013;Wu et al 2016;Lee, Chen, and Wu 2005;Wu, Lin, and Chien 2010;Yurtsever, Kutanoglu, and Johns 2009), time window (Feng, Chu, and Che 2018;Cho et al 2014;Jung et al 2014), time lag or time link (Wang, Huang, and Li 2018;Maleck and Eckert 2017;Knopp, Dauzère-Pérès, and Yugma 2017). To the best of our knowledge, the term Time Constraint Tunnel has itself been introduced for the first time by Sadeghi et al (2015) and extended in our previous work (Lima et al 2017(Lima et al , 2019. Note that simpler representations of successions of TCs have been the subject of several publications, which either deal with only two consecutive time constraints (Wang, Huang, and Li 2018;Feng, Chu, and Che 2018;Wu, Lin, and Chien 2012;Maleck and Eckert 2017;Pappert et al 2016;Kitamura, Mori, and Ono 2006;Robinson 1998;Lee, Chen, and Wu 2005;Wu, Lin, and Chien 2010;Yurtsever, Kutanoglu, and Johns 2009;Jung et al 2014), or focus on a single critical TC under multiple process queue time constraints (Wu et al 2016).…”

“…Following the research stream initiated in (Sadeghi et al 2015) and improved in (Lima et al 2017(Lima et al , 2019, this paper provides a sampling-based probability estimation approach dedicated to managing TCTs in an industrial context. The proposed decision support tool is drawn on an efficient state-of-the-art constructive heuristic, able to face the complexity and intractability of very large instances in complex time-varying environments.…”

“…In industrial practice, time constraint tunnels are managed by making gate-keeping decisions at the point of their entrance (Sadeghi et al 2015;Lima et al 2017Lima et al , 2019. Mirroring the industrial reality, consider the problem from a similar perspective by adopting the point of view of a single lot.…”

“…This multitude of time constraints overlap and follow each other in close succession, as depicted in Figure 1. A succession of Time Constraints has been named Time Constraint Tunnel (TCT) in the related literature (Sadeghi et al 2015;Lima et al 2017Lima et al , 2019.…”

“…This paper addresses the problem of TCT management in an industrial HM-LV context and aims at supporting the dispatching regulation of a lot in a given TCT. Carried out in the continuity of the research stream initiated in (Sadeghi et al 2015;Lima et al 2017Lima et al , 2019, the contribution of this paper is multiple. First, it improves the accuracy of the problem modeling proposed in (Lima et al 2017), by explicitly integrating a priority-based dispatching policy widely adopted in semiconductor fabs.…”