Prioritized automatic material handling services in 300 mm foundry manufacturing

This paper presents a heuristic approach for differentiating material handling services in a highly automated environment of 300 mm foundry manufacturing. A preemptive dispatching policy, Highest Priority Job (HPJ) first, is proposed to expedite the movement of high priority products while keeping acceptable the incurred delays on regular ones. Simulation experiments based on realistic data from a local 300 mm foundry fab are conducted. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed policy is excellent in reducing the transport delays of high priority products to some extremes. Features of HPJ are also discussed.