A CP approach for planning lot release dates in a supply chain of semiconductor manufacturing

Abstract

In this paper a constraint programming (CP) approach for calculating release dates for lots within a supply chain environment is investigated. The lot start times are verified by a simulation model using different dispatching rules focusing on tardiness. To test the presented CP approach a simple fab model is constructed. The fab model consists of parallel batch machines as well as work centers and single machines. The investigated objectives are tardiness, earliness and cycle time. Due to the high complexity decomposition methods for the CP approach are tested. The results from the CP method are lot start dates which are verified by a downstream simulation run. The results show that the presented CP approach could outperform the simulation for all objectives. The content of this paper could be used as a first investigation for new scheduling methods within a supply chain management.