In manufacturing, capacity planning is the process of allocating production resources in accordance with variable demand. The current industry practice in semiconductor manufacturing typically applies heuristic rules to prioritize actions, such as future change lists that account for incoming machine and recipe dedications. However, while offering interpretability, heuristics cannot easily account for the complex interactions along the process flow that can gradually lead to the formation of bottlenecks. Here, we present a neural network-based model for capacity planning on the level of individual machines, trained using deep reinforcement learning. By representing the policy using a heterogeneous graph neural network, the model directly captures the diverse relationships among machines and processing steps, allowing for proactive decision-making. We describe several measures taken to achieve sufficient scalability to tackle the vast space of possible machine-level actions. Our evaluation results cover Intel's small-scale Minifab model and preliminary experiments using the popular SMT2020 testbed. In the largest tested scenario, our trained policy increases throughput and decreases cycle time by about 1.8% each.
@article{arxiv.2509.15767,
title = {Learning to Optimize Capacity Planning in Semiconductor Manufacturing},
author = {Philipp Andelfinger and Jieyi Bi and Qiuyu Zhu and Jianan Zhou and Bo Zhang and Fei Fei Zhang and Chew Wye Chan and Boon Ping Gan and Wentong Cai and Jie Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.15767},
year = {2025}
}