A multiagent-based decision-making system for semiconductor wafer fabrication with hard temporal constraints

作者：Yoon Hyun Joong^*; Shen Weiming

来源：IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing, 2008, 21(1): 83-91.

DOI：10.1109/TSM.2007.914388

• decision-making systems
• hard temporal constraints
• multiagent systems
• scheduling
• semiconductor manufacturing

This paper presents a decision-making system for semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities, or wafer fabs, with hard interoperation temporal constraints. The decision-making system is developed based on a multiagent architecture that is composed of scheduling agents, workcell agents, machine agents';, and product agents. The decision-making problem is to allocate lots into each workcell to satisfy both logical and temporal constraints. A dynamic planning-based approach is adopted for the decision-making mechanism so that the dynamic behaviors of the wafer fab such as aperiodic lot arrivals and reconfiguration can be taken into consideration. The scheduling agents compute quasi-optimal schedules through a bidding mechanism with the workcell agents. The proposed decision-making mechanism uses a concept of temporal constraint sets to obtain a feasible schedule in polynomial steps. The computational complexity of the decision-making mechanism is proven to be O(Lambda 3 . L), where A is the number of operations of a lot and L is the cardinality of the temporal constraint set.

• 出版日期2008-2