Patent ID: 7191033

Claim:
A substrate processing apparatus comprising: a module group which sequentially processes a plurality of substrates in parallel, the module group having multi-modules substrates to be transferred in identical order and composed of a plurality of modules which carry out identical processing for substrates, and including a previous module to which substrates are transferred immediately before the multi-modules; a delivery mechanism configured to deliver substrates to the previous module; and a plurality of transfer mechanism configured to transfer substrates, respectively, to modules in the module group, the apparatus comprising: a recipe storage section which allocates a sequence to a substrate so that the substrates are delivered in a predetermined sequence from the previous module to each module of the multi-modules, specifies a transfer cycle by associating the sequence of the substrate with said each module, creates a transfer schedule by arranging the specified transfer cycle data in time series, and stores the created transfer schedule; a transfer control section which calls the transfer schedule from the recipe storage section, and controls the transfer mechanism so as to transfer a substrate written into the transfer cycle data to a module which corresponds to the substrate; and a transfer schedule changing section which, when delivery of an n-th substrate from the delivery mechanism to the previous module is delayed by “m” cycles, changes the transfer schedule so as to move each of n-th and subsequent substrates including the n-th substrate in the transfer schedule to a module to which an “m”-th substrate following the substrate has been allocated, and transfers the changed transfer schedule data to the transfer control section.