A New Vehicle Dispatching in Semiconductor Intra-Bay Material Handling System

반도체 Intra-Bay 물류시스템에서의 차량 배차

This paper addresses an AGV dispatching problem in semiconductor clean-room bays where AGVs move cassettes of wafers between machines or machines and a central buffer. Since each machine in a bay has a local buffer of limited capacity, material flow should be controlled in a careful way to maintain high system performance. It is regarded that two most important performance measures in a semiconductor bay are throughput rate and lead-time. The throughput rate is determined by a bottleneck resource and the lead-time depends on smooth material flow in the system. This paper presents an AGV dispatching procedure based on the concept of theory of constraints (TOC), by which dispatching decisions are made to utilize the bottleneck resource at the maximum level and to smooth the flow of material. The new dispatching procedure is compared with existing dispatching rules through simulation experiments.