Development of the Order Fulfillment Process in the Foundry Fab by Applying Distributed Multi-Agents on a Generic Message-Passing Platform

For a semiconductor foundry fab, the satisfaction of customers is critical. In order to provide a better service for customers, the modeling and simulation of the order fulfillment process (OFP) is important for the foundry fab since supervisors can use them to find the bottleneck in the process. The scope of this paper is to (1) model the OFP of a foundry fab in the distributed environment using multi-agents; (2) provide the functionalities for each application (agent) in the OFP; and (3) provide a generic message-passing platform (GMPP) for the distributed environment. The OFP can be viewed as the enterprise-scale integration of applications. It is decomposed into four subprocesses: order management process, planning process, manufacturing execution system (MES), and event monitoring. Each application in the subprocess is regarded as an agent and performs its task based on its knowledge constrained by its objectives. Agents are located in the distributed environment in order to possess the properties of a distributed system. The message types in the GMPP are classified into application-to-application, application-to-person and person-to-application. The enabling communication protocols, such as COM+ event, NET-NET and a gateway, which is the protocol converter between applications and users, will be addressed. The entire OFP is built on the GMPP. Some useful information for decision support systems is shown in the simulation results.