A Novel Release Policy for Hybrid Make-to-Stock/Make-to-Order Semiconductor Manufacturing Systems

Production planning of semiconductor manufacturing systems is one of the most complex issues in the literature. This complexity stems from the natural characteristics of these systems such as: producing make-to-stock (MTS) and make-to-order (MTO) products concurrently (hybrid MTS/MTO manufacturing environment), dynamic MTO products arrival, and re-entrancy feature. One of the challenging parts of production planning is the release mechanism of products into the shop. Therefore, in this paper we present a novel release policy for a semiconductor shop (fab) with hybrid MTS/MTO production environment. To evaluate the proposed release policy, several performance measures for MTS and MTO products are considered. Moreover, a number of numerical experiments have been conducted by simulation studies. Simulation studies show the superiority of the proposed release policy on other related well-known release policies in the literature.