On the complexity of short-term production planning and the near-optimality of a sequential assignment problem heuristic approach

• Results of an experimental study of the goodness of practical solutions reported.
• A unique LP-based heuristic is proposed and proved superior.
• Issues of real-time performance, scalability, and re-configurability addressed.
• Proposed algorithm is a fast and efficient heuristic.
• Applied in real-time for large-scale semiconductor manufacturing facilities.

In semiconductor manufacturing, the process of short-term production planning requires setting clear and yet challenging and doable goals to each operation and toolset in the process flow per each product type. We demonstrate the complexity of this problem using an experimental study performed with proficient workforce, and then show how the problem can be decomposed, aggregated, and solved using sequential recurrent linear programming assignment problems. We also refer to the improvements that the proposed algorithm has achieved in practice when applied to multiple semiconductor production facilities, and discuss its efficiency and uniqueness as a fast heuristic relative to other proposed methods.