Design And Implementation Of Linear Programming Based Semiconductor Manufacturing Medium-Term Planning System

The advanced planning and scheduling system is the supplement for the traditional Enterprise Resource Planning system. It can provide a company with real-time adjustable optimal production plan with constrained capacity. In the past decades, some ERP corporations like Oracle and SAP kept performing APS-related research. The APS system developed by them is generic, but it is not customized to any specific industry.The semiconductor manufacturing industry is a high yielding capital-intensive industry. Equipments in the industry are very expensive and are located in manufacturing sites around the world. The company should improve the competency to satisfy the unstable marketing requirements by utilizing the limited capacity of factories. In this case, a reasonable and executable production plan and schedule is critical to a semiconductor company. In this paper, basing on the specialties of semiconductor industry and the APS theory, I built a corresponding mathematical model using the ERP database inside the company network, design and implemented a liner programming based planning system. The company uses this system to make the production plan and achieve profit maximization.This paper is based on an APS project in one of the leading semiconductor companies. The system is used by planning analysts of the company in various locations around the world, and it significantly improves production efficiency and accuracy. The contribution of this paper lies in the mathematical model customized to the specialty in manufacturing process of semiconductor industry. Especially, the system gives users great flexibilities of adjusting the resulting production plan based on their needs; users can modify the priories of business requirement and other parameters in order to have different production plans.