Title
Dynamic vehicle allocation control for automated material handling system in semiconductor manufacturing.
Abstract
The current study examines the dynamic vehicle allocation problems of the automated material handling system (AMHS) in semiconductor manufacturing. With the uncertainty involved in wafer lot movement, dynamically allocating vehicles to each intrabay is very difficult. The cycle time and overall tool productivity of the wafer lots are affected when a vehicle takes too long to arrive. In the current study, a Markov decision model is developed to study the vehicle allocation control problem in the AMHS. The objective is to minimize the sum of the expected long-run average transport job waiting cost. An interesting exhaustive structure in the optimal vehicle allocation control is found in accordance with the Markov decision model. Based on this exhaustive structure, an efficient algorithm is then developed to solve the vehicle allocation control problem numerically. The performance of the proposed method is verified by a simulation study. Compared with other methods, the proposed method can significantly reduce the waiting cost of wafer lots for AMHS vehicle transportation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1016/j.cor.2013.04.007
Computers & Operations Research
Keywords
DocType
Volume
AMHS,Vehicle allocation control,Markov decision process,Simulation
Journal
40
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
10
0305-0548
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
5
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
James T. Lin14710.57
Cheng-Hung Wu2387.96
Chih-Wei Huang310.36