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

    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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