A Path Specification Approach for Production Planning in Semiconductor Industry

This paper explores a new approach for modeling of decision-making problems that involve uncertain, time-dependent and sequence-dependent processes which can be applied to semiconductor industry. In the proposed approach, which is based on probability theory, approximate sample paths are required to be specified by probability and statistic characteristics. Completely specified sample paths are seen to be elementary and fundamental outcomes of the related experiment. The proposed approach is suitable for modeling real processes more accurately. A case study is applied to a single item production planning problem with continuous and uncertain demand and the solution obtained by the approximate path specification method shows less computational efforts and practically desirable features. The application possibility and general plan of the proposed approach in semiconductor manufacturing process is also described in the paper.