A hierarchy method for TFT-LCD production chain planning

With the demands of TFT-LCD (Thin Film Transistor Liquid Crystal Display) increasing, the enterprise are necessary to expand their capacity by adding more plants, which leads to the change from single site planning to multi-stage multi-site planning. According to the characteristics of manufacturing process, a hierarchical planning framework is discussed which consisted of three layers involve: multi-stage planning, multi-site planning and single factory planning. For each layers, due to the different optimization objective, different optimization method is proposed. And a communication mechanism is discussed for the layers´ communication. At the end, how to integrated with the ERP (enterprise resource planning) system is also discussed.