Short-interval expository real-time scheduling of semiconductor manufacturing with mixed integer programming

Efficiently managing the production speed of multiple competing products in semiconductor manufacturing facilities is extremely important from the line management standpoint. Industries have exploited the real time dispatching (RTD) to cope with the problem for the last decade, but the top tier companies have started looking at modern scheduling techniques based on mathematical modeling. We provide real-time scheduling based on mixed integer programming (MIP) capturing the salient characteristics such as shift production targets, machine dedication, sequence-dependent setups, foup queue time, foup priority, schedule stability, etc. Then the reason of specific sequence of foup schedule is communicated to the floor through a self-expository Gantt-Chart. The computer code is written in ezDFS/OPL which provides an all-in-one environment of data manipulation, optimization model development, solving, post processing, and visualization.