A simulation-based two-stage scheduling methodology for controlling semiconductor wafer fabs

In this paper, we propose an efficient simulation-based two-stage scheduling methodology by integrating vector ordinal optimization (VOO) and response surface methodology (RSM) to make a good scheduling policy for fab operation. The suggested method combines local and global rules into a single rule, with the objective of simultaneously optimizing multiple performance indices. Our approach consists of 2 stages: rule combination selection, and parameter optimization. In the first stage, we apply the VOO techniques to effectively selecting good rule combination. Results show that 1 orders of computation time reduction over traditional simulations can be achieved. In the second stage, we adopt RSM and desirability function to tune the parameters associated to scheduling algorithm. The proposed approach is validated by means of a comparison with other scheduling policies. The results show that the proposed scheduling method is effective.