Many manufacturing processes involved in the fabrication and assembly of "high-tech" components have highly variable yields that complicate the planning and control of production. We develop a procedure to determine optimal input quantities at each stage of a serial production system in which process yields at each stage of production may be stochastic. The procedure is applied to an example in the manufacture of a light-emitting diode LED display using actual yield data. We also provide a brief analysis of the quantifiable savings obtained by reducing the variability of the yield at one production stage.
['Hau Leung Lee', 'Candace Arai Yano']
Production control in multistage systems with variable yield losses