Applying Soft Computing Approaches to Search Shop Floor Control Strategies in Wafer Fabrication

• Main Authors: Chao-Yang Liu, 劉朝陽
• Other Authors: D. Y. Sha
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/51786669908652400329

博士 === 國立交通大學 === 工業工程與管理系所 === 93 === The semiconductor manufacturing industry is one of the most important industries in Taiwan. Wafer fabrication is an essential process in semiconductor manufacturing. However, controlling the production system on the shop floor is extremely difficult owing to the complicated manufacturing process and reentrant characteristics. Hence, selecting a suitable shop floor control (SFC) strategy for wafer fabrication is very important. Included in this research are decision problems for order review/release, dispatching and rework strategies. Unlike previous research, which these three SFC strategies are dealt with separately, this paper will consider these three SFC strategies simultaneously. The proposed combination simulation and soft computing approaches (genetic algorithm, simulated annealing and tabu search) are presented for SFC strategies in wafer fabrication. The objective is to seek the near global optimum solution for the combination of SFC strategies for a specific performance indicator, such as WIP, flow time, tardiness, tardy rate, delay cost and throughput within the reasonable computational time. From the results, the proposed methodology is found to perform well for combinations of SFC strategies using different performance indicators in wafer fabrication. Considerable computational time is saved in this research. The results indicate that a concept of simulation-search procedure should be applied in order to solve the decision-making problem for SFC multiple control strategies quickly in a production system.