An FNLP approach for planning energy-efficient manufacturing: Wafer fabrication as an example

Energy efficiency is a key manufacturing goal. This paper propose a novel fuzzy nonlinear programming (FNLP) approach to production planning to minimize energy wastage due to poor quality control. Manufacturing is modeled a fuzzy yield learning process to quantify energy savings for each specific product, and these values can be summed to produce total power consumption for the factory. Finally, the proposed FNLP approach formulates and solves a FNLP problem to minimize the total energy consumption in the factory by optimizing the product mix. Some theoretical properties of the proposed FNLP approach are discussed. A wafer fab is used as an example to illustrate the applicability of the proposed FNLP approach, with experimental results showing a potential reduction of 17.2% of total power consumption by optimizing the product mix.