D-SIMCON is a suite of advanced domain-specific decision support modules for Capacity Planning & Optimisation, WIP Management and Scheduling & Dispatching in Semiconductor Manufacturing. The solution addresses the typical challenges in operating and managing the dynamic production line of a factory as complex as a wafer fabrication facility:
- 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 parameters for scheduling and dispatching as their effect on the 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 lack of user acceptance;
- Challenges associated with quantifying customer order commitments and due-dates when using capacity models that are not able to portray the interdependencies between capacity utilisation and cycle time.
All modules can be deployed on a parallel computing infrastructure and are Cloud compliant to maximise scalability and minimise execution times.