A Hierarchy method for TFT-LCD Production Chain Planning

With the demands of TFT-LCD(Thin Film Transistor Liquid Crystal Display)increasing, the enterprise are necessary to expand their capacity by adding more plants, which leads to the change from single site planning to multi-stage multi-site planning. According to the characteristics of manufacturing process, a hierarchical planning framework is discussed which consisted of three layers involve: multi-stage planning, multi-site planning and single factory planning. For each layers, due to the different optimization objective, different optimization method is proposed. And a communication mechanism is discussed for the layers' communication. At the end, how to integrated with the ERP (enterprise resource planning)system is also discussed.