GOALI: Implementing Global Factory Schedules in Automated Facilities

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This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project is to develop an integrated set of scheduling and structural controllers to implement a global schedule. The investigators will not explore new methods of developing global schedules, but rather will seek to develop a systematic approach to implementing them, with implicit assumption that the global schedule accurately reflects management priorities. The scheduling controller takes the job priorities developed by the global schedule as input, and reschedules jobs in the face of disruptions to minimize deviations from the global schedule as well as improve system performance. The structural controller manages the distribution of work in the system to avoid states in which the system is vulnerable to disruptions. Thus the function of the structural controller is to make the tasks of the scheduling controller easier by maintaining a "good" distribution of jobs relative to production and material handling capacity. The researchers will formulate a novel approach for rescheduling problems, which exploit the information in a global schedule while maintaining its performance as closely as possible. Structural control policies that avoid system states, i.e., distributions of lots throughout the factory that are unduly vulnerable to disruptions will be investigated. The research will be pursued in the context of semiconductor wafer fabrication, where the investigators have extensive experience and the industrial partner is the primary supplier of such software to the semiconductor industry. Hence the team is uniquely qualified to address this inherently interdisciplinary problem and present novel, practical approaches for its solution.