Load Balancing among Photolithography Machines in Semiconductor Manufacturing

We propose a multiagent scheduling system (MSS) based on a resource schedule and execution matrix (RSEM) to tackle the issue of load balancing among photolithography machines in semiconductor manufacturing. This issue is derived from the dedicated photolithography machine constraint. It is one of the new challenges introduced in photolithography machinery due to natural bias. However, many scheduling policies or modeling methods proposed by previous research for the semiconductor manufacturing production have not addressed the load balancing issue and dedicated machine constraint. In this paper, we describe the design of the proposed MSS approach in detail, including the system architecture, coordination strategy, and its scheduling method on the RSEM. We also present the simulation results that validate the approach