Petri net modeling and one-wafer scheduling of single-arm multi-cluster tools

Abstract

It is very challenging to schedule a multi-cluster tool for it needs to coordinate the activities of multiple robots. This paper studies one-wafer cyclic scheduling for multi-cluster tools whose bottleneck cluster tool is process-bound. A Petri net model is developed to describe the system. Based on the model, it is shown that, for any multi-cluster tool whose bottleneck cluster tool is process-bound, there is always a one-wafer cyclic schedule. Then, a method is presented to find the minimal cycle time and the optimal one-wafer cyclic schedule. The method requires only simple calculation. An example illustrates the application and effectiveness of the proposed method.