Optimizing the location of crossovers in conveyor-based automated material handling systems in Semiconductor wafer fabs

This research presents several heuristics to optimize the location of crossovers in a conveyor-based Automated Material Handling System (AMHS) for a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility. The objective is to determine the location of crossovers that minimizes the total cost of the expected work-in-process on the conveyor and the cost of installing and operating the AMHS with the crossovers. The proposed heuristics are integrated with a queuing-based analytical model incorporating practical hardware considerations of the AMHS, such as turntables and crossovers. To illustrate the proposed heuristics’ practical application they are applied to SEMATECH’s virtual wafer fabrication facility. Experimental results demonstrate that under a wide variety of operating conditions and cost scenarios the local improvement heuristic is able to identify the optimal solution and outperform other commonly used heuristics for layout design such as genetic algorithms.