Backward Simulation for Production Planning – Recent Advances in a Real-World Use-Case

The focus on customer orientation as well as on-time production and delivery portray the competitive environment for manufacturing companies in the semiconductor industry. Customer-specific products must be manufactured due to specified lead times and according to promised delivery dates. In this context, questions as to whether the production target is feasible and if all previously promised delivery dates will be met are often answered with backward-oriented planning approaches without taking into consideration any uncertainty or alternatives, that arise during operations. Regarding complex manufacturing systems (here semiconductor with re-entry cycles), these questions can be answered in a more detailed and robust by a discrete event-based simulation (DES) approach used in a backward-oriented manner. Research results show that the taken approach can be applied successfully for the scheduling of customer-specific orders in a real-world setting.