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Volume 7 Issue 3
Apr.  2020

IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica

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Jipeng Wang, Hesuan Hu, Chunrong Pan, Yuan Zhou and Liang Li, "Scheduling Dual-Arm Cluster Tools With Multiple Wafer Types and Residency Time Constraints," IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 776-789, May 2020. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003150
Citation: Jipeng Wang, Hesuan Hu, Chunrong Pan, Yuan Zhou and Liang Li, "Scheduling Dual-Arm Cluster Tools With Multiple Wafer Types and Residency Time Constraints," IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 776-789, May 2020. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003150

Scheduling Dual-Arm Cluster Tools With Multiple Wafer Types and Residency Time Constraints

doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003150
Funds:  This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71361014, 61973242, 61573265, 51665018) and the Major Fundamental Research Program of the Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (2017ZDJC-34)
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  • Accompanying the unceasing progress of integrated circuit manufacturing technology, the mainstream production mode of current semiconductor wafer fabrication is featured with multi-variety, small batch, and individual customization, which poses a huge challenge to the scheduling of cluster tools with single-wafer-type fabrication. Concurrent processing multiple wafer types in cluster tools, as a novel production pattern, has drawn increasing attention from industry to academia, whereas the corresponding research remains insufficient. This paper investigates the scheduling problems of dual-arm cluster tools with multiple wafer types and residency time constraints. To pursue an easy-to-implement cyclic operation under diverse flow patterns, we develop a novel robot activity strategy called multiplex swap sequence. In the light of the virtual module technology, the workloads that stem from bottleneck process steps and asymmetrical process configuration are balanced satisfactorily. Moreover, several sufficient and necessary conditions with closed-form expressions are obtained for checking the system’s schedulability. Finally, efficient algorithms with polynomial complexity are developed to find the periodic scheduling, and its practicability and availability are demonstrated by the offered illustrative examples.

     

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    Highlights

    • This paper investigates the scheduling problems of dual-arm cluster tools with multiple wafer types and residency time constraints.
    • To pursue an easy-to-implement cyclic operation under diverse flow patterns, we develop a novel robot operation strategy that reveals effectiveness for the simplicity of its enforcement and the flexibility of tackling with intricate combination of flow patterns.
    • According to the analysis of the distribution characteristic of the natural workload, we derive several necessary and sufficient conditions with closed-form expressions for verifying the system’s schedulability.
    • The methodology presented in this paper can handle diverse complex multi-type wafer flow patterns and complicated constraints, such as WRTCs, parallel PMs, and shared PMs.

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