Title

Optimising the location of crossovers in conveyor-based automated material handling systems in semiconductor wafer fabs

Authors

Authors

S. Hong; A. L. Johnson; H. J. Carlo; D. Nazzal;J. A. Jimenez

Comments

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Abbreviated Journal Title

Int. J. Prod. Res.

Keywords

wafer fabrication; AMHS; conveyors; analytical models; heuristics; crossovers; facility design; FABRICATION FACILITIES; SPINE LAYOUT; DESIGN; Engineering, Industrial; Engineering, Manufacturing; Operations Research; & Management Science

Abstract

This research presents several heuristics to optimise the location of crossovers in a conveyor-based automated material handling system (AMHS) for a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility. The objective is to determine the location of crossovers that minimises the total cost of the expected work-in-process on the conveyor and the cost of installing and operating the AMHS with the crossovers. The proposed heuristics are integrated with a queuing-based analytical model incorporating practical hardware considerations of the AMHS, such as turntables and crossovers. To illustrate the proposed heuristics' practical application they are applied to SEMATECH's virtual wafer fabrication facility. Experimental results demonstrate that under a wide variety of operating conditions and cost scenarios the local improvement heuristic is able to identify the optimal solution and outperform other commonly used heuristics for layout design such as genetic algorithms.

Journal Title

International Journal of Production Research

Volume

49

Issue/Number

20

Publication Date

1-1-2011

Document Type

Article

Language

English

First Page

6199

Last Page

6226

WOS Identifier

WOS:000299896000012

ISSN

0020-7543

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