Coordinating decentralized local schedulers in complex supply chain manufacturing

Motivated by scheduling challenges in back-end semiconductor manufacturing, we propose a framework to oversee and integrate local decentralized scheduling algorithms utilized in complex supply chain manufacturing networks. We fill the gap between higher-level production planning and lower-level scheduling by establishing short-term production targets and priority scores for each product at each step in the system. Given a target output schedule, target cycle times for each step, the process and product structure, and initial WIP status, short-term production targets for each product/step are set. These targets can be used to evaluate the system performance and guide decentralized schedulers to control the system so as to achieve desirable outputs in dynamic environments.