Efficient scheduling policies to reduce mean and variance of cycle-time in semiconductor manufacturing plants

The problem of reducing the mean and variance of cycle time in semiconductor manufacturing plants is addressed. Such plants feature a characteristic reentrant process flow, where lots repeatedly return at different stages of their production to the same service stations for further processing, consequently creating much competition for machines. We introduce a new class of scheduling policies, called Fluctuation Smoothing policies. Unanimously, our policies achieved the best mean cycle time and Standard Deviation of Cycle Time, in all the configurations of plant models and release policies tested. As an example, under the recommended Workload Regulation Release policy, for a heavily loaded Research and Development Fabrication Line model, our Fluctuation Smoothing policies achieved a reduction of 22.4% in the Mean Queueing Time, and a reduction of 52.0% in the Standard Deviation of Cycle Time, over the baseline FIFO policy. These conclusions are based on extensive simulations conducted on two models of semiconductor manufacturing plants. The first is a model of a Research and Development Fabrication Line. The second is an aggregate model intended to approximate a full scale production line. Statistical tests are used to corroborate our conclusions.>