Accelerating Products under Due-date Oriented Dispatching Rules in Semiconductor Manufacturing

In semiconductor manufacturing facilities, there is often the need to speed up certain product types. This is usually done by either assigning higher priorities or by reducing due dates. In this paper, we study the effects of accelerating one product type by a tighter due date on the on-time delivery performance of the other products manufactured. It turns out that the results depend on the considered factory, its load, and the accelerated product. As a consequence, it will be hard for production planners to find simple rules of thumb for the effects of accelerating products. In general, detailed simulation experiments will be required.