General Electric Uses Simulation and Risk Analysis for Silicon Carbide Production System Design
Abstract
This article describes a model we developed to manage risk and value for silicon carbide (SiC) manufacturing at General Electric (GE). Our goal is to improve GE’s understanding of SiC fabrication design at the New York Power Electronics Manufacturing Consortium (PEMC) facility. Using this model, we determine the production-capacity risk profile of the PEMC facility and identify an equipment portfolio that minimizes the expected production shortfall, while meeting the capital expenditure (CAPEX) budgetary constraints for each year of the planning horizon. We further present selected operational strategies to support the solution to the equipment-portfolio optimization problem. We expect the impact of the analytical findings on the SiC production system design to be an improvement of 67% in mean annual throughput and an increase of less than 1% in CAPEX.
