Design of reconfigurable semiconductor manufacturing systems with maintenance and failure

Due to expensive, highly complex and time-consuming processes, semiconductor-manufacturing systems have been given a special attention. In our previous work, a heuristic algorithm to design the reconfigurably automated production system was proposed. However, machine breakdowns and planned and unplanned maintenance were not considered. This paper extends that work and addresses the related design issues in reconfigurable back-end semiconductor manufacturing systems with failures and maintenance. Considering different conditions of machines, queuing network approaches are used to derive the throughput of machines to enhance the proposed virtual production line (VPL) design methodology in which the throughput was originally computed using the deterministic machine processing time. A priority is assigned to each idle machine according to its past performance and adaptive algorithms for reconfiguration are proposed.