Capacity Planning of the Semiconductors Manufacturing Supply Chain: A Decision Method and Application

The semiconductors manufacturing involves complex supply chains. Because of highly dynamic market demand and limited available production capacity, the operations plan of semiconductors industry must well consider the capacity collaboration between multiple production plants in terms of front-end wafer fabrication and back-end packaging and testing.Based on the Advanced Planning Systems (APS) framework, this study develops a two-phase decision method to support the capacity planning in the semiconductors manufacturing supply chain. In it, we first use the method of linear programming to get a baseline solution, and then use computer simulation to approximate a detailed solution for the production capacity planning of supply chain. The solution method is validated by a global semiconductors manufacturing company and shows satisfactory results from the viewpoint of capacity utilization.