Design of due-date oriented look-ahead batching rule in wafer fabrication

In wafer fabrication processes, batch processing accounts for over 30% of the overall processing time. And it’s a trade-off between machine utilization and wafer waiting time. Therefore, batch machines have become one of the constraint resources during wafer fabrication. How to maintain the utilization and reduce the waiting time are important tasks for production control. Plenty of research in the past several years focused on the dispatching rules of batch processing. According to many researchers, look-ahead batch dispatching rules outperform MBS on waiting times and machine utilization. The look-ahead batching rules that have been developed are DBH, NACH, MCR, and DJAH. However, these rules do not take the due-date information of wafers into consideration, and can’t accelerate the wafer’s fabrication that will not be completed before the due-date. This study will develop a due-date oriented look-ahead batching rule, namely LBCR, that considers the due-date and expects to raise delivery rates and reduce the average tardiness. Firstly, this study will modify those batching rules to fit the manufacturing environment of wafer fabrication. There are serial simulation tests on those batching rules under various kinds of factors in terms of environment, including traffic intensity, product numbers and product mix rate. Finally, this study will compare the five batching rules on different performance indicators. After the simulation and statistic analysis undertaken, LBCR does outperform other batch dispatching rules on due-date related performance indicators, such as tardy rate and average tardiness.