A novel approach to scheduling of single-arm cluster tools with wafer revisiting

  • Authors:

  • NaiQi Wu;Feng Chu;Chengbin Chu;MengChu Zhou

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Industrial Engineering, School of Mechatronics Engineering, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China;University of Technology of Troyes, Troyes, France;Ecole Centrale Paris, Paris, France;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ

  • Venue:
  • CASE'09 Proceedings of the fifth annual IEEE international conference on Automation science and engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This paper conducts a study for scheduling single-arm cluster tools with typical wafer revisiting pattern (mi, mi+1)k where i means the ith-step and mi and mi+1 mean the corresponding quantity of the modules in i and i+1-th steps, and k the number of visiting times. With a Petri net (PN) model, it is shown that, mi=mi+1 =1, the optimal schedule for the revisiting process is deterministic and unique, and the minimal cycle time can be calculated by an analytical expression. It is also shown that, when mi = 1 and mi+1 = 2 or mi = 2 and mi+1 = 1, the optimal one-wafer cyclic schedule for the revisiting process can be obtained in k deterministic schedules by comparing their cycle times. Based on the scheduling and cycle time analysis of a revisiting process, a novel method is presented to schedule the overall system by treating the revisiting process as a macro step.