Overview

D-SIMCON is a suite of advanced domain-specific decision support products for WIP Management, Dispatching, Dynamic Capacity Planning and Load Mix Optimisation in Semiconductor Manufacturing. The solution addresses the typical challenges in operating and managing a dynamic production line:
• Unexpected material waves at work centres and breakdowns of bottleneck tools that create congestion and increase variability, resulting in frequent fire fighting;
• Challenges associated with ad-hoc solutions to address material flow congestion that tend to just push the problem to elsewhere in the fab;
• The difficulty of fine-tuning dispatch rules as their effect on the overall fab performance is hard to assess and could even be counterproductive;
• Painful and lengthy simulation model development processes limiting the usefulness of such simulation models;
• Missing data and/or bad data quality, leading to “Garbage-in –garbage-out” situations for the enabling decision support software modules, resulting in frustrations with their users;
• Challenges associated with quantifying customer order commitments and due-dates when using static capacity models for planning and managing customer orders.
All modules can be deployed on parallel computing infrastructure to minimise execution times and are hosted on a web server allowing centralised maintenance.