Deep reinforcement learning for semiconductor production scheduling

Despite producing tremendous success stories by identifying cat videos 1 or solving computer as well as board games 2, 3, the adoption of deep learning in the semiconductor industry is moderatre. In this paper, we apply Google DeepMind's Deep Q Network (DQN) agent algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) to semiconductor production scheduling. In an RL environment several cooperative DQN agents, which utilize deep neural networks, are trained with flexible user-defined objectives. We show benchmarks comparing standard dispatching heuristics with the DQN agents in an abstract frontend-of-line semiconductor production facility. Results are promising and show that DQN agents optimize production autonomously for different targets.