Benefits and Drawbacks of Simple Models for Complex Production Systems
MIT SEMINAR SERIES IN MANUFACTURING AND
PRODUCTIVITY
Place: Room 33-116 Time: 12:00 P.M. Thurday December 7th, 2006
Professor Oliver Rose
Dresden University of Technology
Semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities are among the most complex production facilities. A large product variety, hundreds of processing steps per product, hundreds of machines of different types, and automated transport lead to a system complexity which is difficult to understand and hard to handle. For teaching planners and developing adequate material flow control mechanisms, simple models for this complex environment are required. We outline two simplifying approaches, one for fostering the understanding of the factory and one for the development of a control rule for a complex type of machine. In the first example we show how a simple model can be used to predict the factory behavior after a bottleneck work center breakdown. In the second example, we discuss an approach to tell how a few simple characteristics of a cluster tool can be used to run a fast sequencing algorithm for this tool type. In both cases, we present the practical benefits and the drawbacks of very simple modeling approaches.
About the Speaker
Oliver Rose holds the Chair for Modeling and Simulation at the Institute of Applied Computer Science of the Dresden University of Technology, Germany. He received an M.S. degree in applied mathematics and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Würzburg University, Germany. His research focuses on the operational modeling, analysis and material flow control of complex manufacturing facilities, in particular, semiconductor factories. He is a member of IEEE, INFORMS Simulation Society, ASIM, and GI.
