Agent-Based Scheduling for Semiconductor Wafer Fabrication Facilities

This paper proposes an agent-based scheduling method for semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities with hard inter-operation temporal constraints. The scheduling problem is to find the feasible schedules that guarantee both logical and temporal correctness. A proposed multi-agent based architecture is composed of scheduling agents, workcell agents, and machine agents. A scheduling agent computes optimal schedules through bidding mechanisms with a subset or entire set of the workcell agents. A dynamic planning-based approach is adopted for the scheduling mechanism so that the dynamic behaviors such as aperiodic job arrivals and reconfiguration can be taken into consideration.