Queue Length Forecasting in Complex Manufacturing Job Shops

Currently, manufacturing is characterized by increasing complexity both on the technical and organizational levels. Thus, more complex and intelligent production control methods are developed in order to remain competitive and achieve operational excellence. Operations management described early on the influence among target metrics, such as queuing times, queue length, and production speed. However, accurate predictions of queue lengths have long been overlooked as a means to better understanding manufacturing systems. In order to provide queue length forecasts, this paper introduced a methodology to identify queue lengths in retrospect based on transitional data, as well as a comparison of easy-to-deploy machine learning-based queue forecasting models. Forecasting, based on static data sets, as well as time series models can be shown to be successfully applied in an exemplary semiconductor case study. The main findings concluded that accurate queue length prediction, even with minimal available data, is feasible by applying a variety of techniques, which can enable further research and predictions.