Segment-based approach for real-time reactive rescheduling for automatic manufacturing control

We propose a new segment-based approach for a real-time reactive rescheduling method, which is applicable to actual large-scale manufacturing systems, such as fully-automated semiconductor wafer fabrication lines. The proposed method can efficiently (in terms of computation time) schedule processing operations at equipment units by dividing a wide scheduling range into small segments, and by using a greedy scheduling algorithm. From the simulation results obtained, we experimentally confirmed that the proposed method manages to keep all schedules at 55 equipment units executable in terms of processing performance and schedule quality at all times.