A drum-buffer-rope based scheduling method for semiconductor manufacturing system

Scheduling in semiconductor manufacturing system is an important task for the industries faced with a large amount of resource competitions. Effective scheduling can improve the overall system performance and customer satisfaction. In this paper, a scheduling method with the core of bottleneck equipment control is designed referring to Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR) theory. In order to identify the main-bottleneck, the relative load which takes the feature of reentrance into consideration is applied. For the avoidance of local blocking, the management of sub-bottleneck is presented. As both releasing and dispatching are taken into account, a scheduling method based on the compound priority is formed. Finally, HP-24 semiconductor wafer fabrication is used as an example to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.