Integrated Maintenance Decision-Making and Product Sequencing in Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

In highly flexible and integrated manufacturing systems, such as semiconductor manufacturing, the strong dynamic interactions between the equipment condition, operations executed on the equipment, and the resulting product quality necessitate a methodology that integrates the decision-making process across the domains of maintenance scheduling and production operations. Currently, maintenance and production operations decision-making are two decoupled processes. In this paper, we devise an integrated decision-making policy for maintenance scheduling and production sequencing, with the objective of optimizing a customizable objective function, while taking into account operation-dependent degradation models and a production target. Optimization was achieved using a metaheuristic method based on the results of discrete-event simulations of the target manufacturing system. The new approach is demonstrated in simulations of a generic cluster tool routinely used in semiconductor manufacturing. The results show that jointly making maintenance and production sequencing decisions consistently and often significantly outperforms the current practice of making these decisions separately.

A social network of collaborating industrial assets

“…(1) Parallel machines capable of performing the same type of task are commonly seen in manufacturing plants, enabling the shifting of workload from one machine to the other while still fulfilling the production demand; (2) The degradation rate of an asset as it operates is closely related by the type and amount of tasks assigned to it, 42,43 making it possible to actively control the residual life of an asset by dynamically changing its workload.…”

“…The degradation rate of an asset as it operates is closely related by the type and amount of tasks assigned to it, 42,43 making it possible to actively control the residual life of an asset by dynamically changing its workload.…”

Dynamically scheduling and maintaining a flexible server

“…Moreover, while previous work such as that of Andradóttir et al (2007) and Wu et al (2006, 2008) has accounted for server failures in the context of queueing models of flexible manufacturing systems, with the exception of Cai et al (2013), we are not aware of any other work in this area that combines scheduling with maintenance decisions. We note that there has been recent work on joint scheduling and maintenance in the contexts of deterministic scheduling (Grigoriu & Briskorn, 2017), developing metaheuristics (Celen & Djurdjanovic, 2015), and mixed‐integer programming that incorporates constraints specific to semiconductor manufacturing (Cai et al, 2012; Yao et al, 2004).…”

Lease-Oriented Opportunistic Maintenance for Multi-Unit Leased Systems Under Product-Service Paradigm

“…Normally, two types of maintenance actions, corrective maintenance (CM) and PM, are performed to maintain the upkeep of the leased system [2][3][4][5]. Corrective maintenance typically takes the form of minimal repair actions to bring back a failed machine to 1 its operational state without changing its failure rate.…”