Online Rescheduling in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Semiconductor manufacturing is mainly characterized by diversity of products, different process types, and random failures. It is extremely difficult to solve scheduling problems due to high frequency of disturbance occurrence. This paper proposes a new approach for the online manufacturing rescheduling method. Instead of having a dispatching process based on dispatching rules once again, we revise the existing schedule based on message passing principle once the disturbance occurs, and improve the performance of the revised schedule by the introduction of a quick local search according to permutations of processes on semi-critical paths. The proposed method can release the influence of disturbances in less than 1 second, and finish rescheduling process in less than 1 minute. Through the actual problems with about 200,000 processes, this method is evaluated to be more effective for actual manufacturing than the dispatching-rule based methods, some of which have been applied in many facilities