Coordination and control of batch-based multistage processes

Kai Han, Kaibo Wang
2013 Journal of manufacturing systems  
Run-to-run (R2R) process control has attracted much attention in research and has been widely used in practice. It has been proved effective at compensating for process disturbances by using R2R controllers at a single stage. However, most manufacturing processes span across multiple stages; variation in earlier stages can be magnified stage by stage if they are not properly eliminated. In addition, products are processed batch by batch in certain manufacturing processes. In such cases, the
more » ... itional EWMA controller might not effectively reduce the variation. This paper focuses on developing a process control strategy for batch production in a multistage process. In the newly proposed framework, a batch-allocation operation is introduced to group products into similar clusters before each stage; an R2R controller is then implemented to generate customized recipes for each batch. This framework emphasizes better coordination among the stages in a multistage process. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy is effective for the reduction of variation.
doi:10.1016/j.jmsy.2012.12.004 fatcat:d7wae4utbbbvlgfqf77lrbhj5a