Internal transport in automated semiconductor manufacturing systems

Abstract

This paper summarizes the main results presented by the author in his PhD thesis (Montoya-Torres 2005), supervised by Stephane Dauzeere-Peres, Jean-Pierre Campagne and Helene Marian, and defended on 29 November 2005 at the Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne and Universite Jean-Monnet. The thesis is written in French and is available upon request from the author. This work deals with a real-life transportation problem in the semiconductor industry. It proposes a new approach by integrating tactical and operational decisions for the control of the automated transport system. At the tactical level, the problem is modeled using integer linear programming models inspired from Location Theory. At the operational level, the solution obtained from the tactical optimization is coupled with a discrete-event computer simulation program and some policies for transportation operations are implemented and compared.