Abstract
Semiconductor manufacturing process flow is consisted of hundreds of process steps using hundreds of machines repeatedly, which is called a re-entrant flow shop, and it is very difficult to optimize the production schedule. Furthermore, in recent years, it has been becoming more difficult to use machines effectively because the product-mix becomes much more complex and the production lot size becomes much smaller. Therefore, it is indispensable to integrate a variety of scheduling methods into a solution to achieve the high production efficiency. In our previous researches we applied the well-known cooperative scheduling method, Lagrangian Decomposition and Coordination method, into an abstracted model based on the actual production line. Then we have verified the proposed method can create schedule effectively. In this paper we show the effectiveness for also larger models and make clear the issue in applying it into the actual scale model.
