Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Health care management
Reexamination Certificate
1993-07-22
2001-07-24
McElheny, Jr., Donald E. (Department: 2862)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Health care management
Reexamination Certificate
active
06266646
ABSTRACT:
TECHNICAL FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The invention generally relates to factory systems and more specifically to a method and system for production planning.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Semiconductor manufacturing is broadly divided into three areas, material, preparation and design, for example, designing the circuits to be fabricated, preparing photolithography masks and making raw wafers, and wafer processing, for example constructing circuits into the wafer and assembly, packaging and testing, for example which packages and tests each individual circuit.
Production planning is the process of choosing objects to be started and to be worked in a manufacturing facility during some future time period or time interval in accordance with a plan so that performance is maximized. These objects are usually selected from a variety of product types which may require different resources and serve different customers. Therefore, the selection of the object must optimize customer-independent performance measures such as cycle time and customer-dependent performance measures such as on-time delivery.
The reasons for requiring advance production planning may be unique to each manufacturing facility or factory. For example, one facility may require advanced planning so that materials may be ordered and delivered in time for the manufacturer. Another facility may require advanced planning to make delivery commitments to customer or predict delays in delivery of the product, namely the object.
To configure a production plan which yields the best performance, the capacity, or amount of work the facility can complete must be modeled in some fashion, since planning objects to be worked when the capacity of the facility has been reached compromises performance and yields no positive benefits.
The production plan usually entails construction of schedules of the objects to be worked to govern the production of orders of the objects in the job shop or facility. The construction of schedules to govern the production of orders in a facility is a complex problem that is influenced by knowledge or information accumulated from many different sources within the facility. The acceptability of a particular schedule or plan depends upon diverse and conflicting factors such as due date requirements, cost restrictions, production levels, machine capabilities and substitutability, alternative productive process, order characteristics, order requirements and resource availability.
One prior technique uses a purely predictive approach to scheduling, based on a restricted model of the environment; predictions are made as to when operations are to be performed The resulting schedules or plan often bear little resemblance to the actual state of the factory, leaving detailed schedules to the shop-floor supervisor.
OBJECTS OF THE INVENTION
It is an object of the invention to provide an ordered list of choices, taking into account constraints and goals.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a list of goals which can be used by either the production scheduler (the scheduler) or the production planner (the planner) to include a list of goals, some of which relate only to the planner, some only to the scheduler and some both to the scheduler and planner.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a global production strategy, such that the global production strategy contains goals from both the goals list of the planner and scheduler.
It is an object of the direct present invention to provide global control by assuring that the objects are planned and scheduled through the global production strategy.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention provides an ordered list of choices which have been ordered in terms of goals and constraints.
The present invention provides a list of goals which includes both planner constraints, goals and heuristics and scheduler constraints, goals and heuristics.
The present invention matches a list of planner priorities with the goals to produce a global production strategy.
Further, the present invention provides global control of the scheduler and the planner by assuring that the objects are planned and scheduled through global production strategy such that both the planner and scheduler will achieve the same consistent goals.
The present invention includes an apparatus for generating a plan, comprising: circuitry for reading a list of priorities including both planner goals and scheduling goals and a goals list including goals indicating either a planner goal or a schedule goal comprising; circuitry for producing a global production strategy list from the priorities list and the goals list; and circuitry for resolving a choice from the goals list.
The present invention includes a goal that includes an indication to indicate if the goal is either a planner goal or a schedule goal.
The present invention includes a global production strategy list that includes a heuristic to resolve the choice.
The present invention includes a global production strategy that includes constraints to resolve the choice.
The present invention includes a method for producing a plan including the steps of: reading a list of priorities including both planner goals and scheduling goals and a goals list including goals indicating either a planner or a scheduler goal; the step of producing a global production strategy list from the list of priority and goals list; and the step of resolving a choice from the goals list.
The present invention includes the step of providing an indication to indicate if the goal is either a planner goal or a scheduler goal.
The present invention includes the step of providing heuristics to resolve the choice.
The present invention includes the step of providing constraints to resolve the choice.
These and other features of the invention that will be apparent to those skilled in the art from the following detailed description of the invention, taken together with the accompanying drawings.
REFERENCES:
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patent: 5155679 (1992-10-01), Jain et al.
patent: 5212791 (1993-05-01), Damian et al.
Lawrence M. Wein Scheduling Semiconductor Wafer Fabrication, vol. 1, No. 3, 8/88, IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing, pp. 115-130.
James F. Allen, Maintaining Knowledge about Temporal Intervals, vol. 26, No. 11, 11/83, Communications of the ACM, pp. 832-843.
Patrick Henry Winston, Artificial Intelligence, 2nd Edition, Chapter 4, Exploring Alternatives, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., pp. 87-101.
Mark S. Fox and Stephen F. Smith, ISIS-a knowledge-based system for factory scheduling, vol. 1, No. 1, 7/84, Expert Systems, pp. 25-49.
R.M. Kerr and R.N. Walker, A Job Scheduling System Based on Fuzzy Arithmetic, pp. 433-450.
C. Roger Glassey and Mauricio G. C. Resende, Closed-Loop Job Release Control for VLSI Circuit Manufacturing, vol. 1, No. 1, 2/88, IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing, pp. 36-46.
Fargher Hugh E.
Smith Richard A.
Brady W. James
McElheny Jr. Donald E.
Swayze, Jr. W. Daniel
Telecky , Jr. Frederick J.
Texas Instruments Incorporated
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