Title: A localised fuzzy-neural fluctuation smoothing rule for job scheduling in a wafer fab

Authors: Toly Chen

Addresses: Feng Chia University, 100, Wenhwa Rd., Seatwen, Taichung City, Taiwan

Abstract: This paper presents a localised fuzzy-neural fluctuation smoothing rule to improve the performance of scheduling jobs in a wafer fabrication factory (wafer fab). The rule is modified from the tailored non-linear fluctuation smoothing (TNFS) rule with some innovative treatments. First, the remaining cycle time of a job is forecasted with an evolving fuzzy-neural approach in order to improve the accuracy. Second, in the original TNFS rule, the adjustable factor is static, and in this rule it becomes dynamic. Third, the adjustable factor in the new rule depends on the jobs gathering before the same machine, and the TNFS rule becomes localised. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, production simulation is also applied in this study. According to the experimental results, the proposed methodology is better than some existing approaches in reducing the average cycle time and cycle time standard deviation. [Received 21 September 2010; Revised 3 June 2011; Accepted 26 September 2011]

Keywords: wafer fabrication; scheduling; fuzzy logic; neural networks; localised; fluctuation smoothing; cycle time; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMR.2012.050104

International Journal of Manufacturing Research, 2012 Vol.7 No.4, pp.409 - 425

Published online: 22 Nov 2014 *

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