Wafer fab control via distributed pricing mechanism

Summary form only given. This paper presents a generic framework of decentralized shop floor control via a pricing mechanism for electronic wafer fabrication facilities, in which a variety of control tasks are distributed to different control agents. According to the authors´ framework, when a customer order arrives, the customer agent will determine the releasing of this order through negotiation with the resource agent. Similarly the work area agents will make decisions for individual machines. The competitive equilibrium can be realized through an auction based pricing mechanism. The initial result indicates that this novel approach significantly improve the system performance and simplify the procedure of the traditional control rules for wafer fabrication systems