A bottleneck detection and dynamic dispatching strategy for semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities

According to the Theory of Constraints (TOC), the performance of a complex manufacturing system such as semiconductor wafer fabrication facility (wafer fab) is mainly determined by its bottleneck. In this paper, we investigate a bottleneck detection and corresponding dynamic dispatching strategy to regulate the workload of the bottleneck and non-bottleneck machines, in order to prevent bottleneck starvation and non-bottleneck with a high work in process (WIP) occurrence. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method achieves improvement with respect to average cycle time, cycle time variance and on time delivery compared with the classical dispatching strategies such as First In First Out (FIFO), Critical Ratio (CR).