Systematic construction and performance analysis of cluster tools using timed Petri net models

Zuberek, W.M.

14 Congresso Brasileiro de Automatica (14-th Brazilian Automation Conference) - Petri Net Workshop; Natal, Brazil, 2-5 September 2002.

Abstract:

A cluster tool is an integrated, environmentally isolated manufacturing system consisting of process, transport, and cassette modules, mechanically linked together, that is used in manufacturing of semiconductor chips. Because of high throughput requirements, cluster tools perform a number of activities concurrently. Petri nets are formal models developed specifically for representation of concurrent activities and for their coordination. In timed nets, the durations of modeled activities are represented by occurrence times associated with transitions, and this allows to study the performance characteristics of the modeled systems. Since cluster tools can be quite complex, a systematic approach to generating net models is proposed. Net models derived in such a way have modular structure, which is used to determine model's steady-state performance on the basis of net invariants, without the exhaustive reachability analysis. Performance characteristics are obtained in symbolic form, in terms of modeling parameters, so different variants of cluster tools can be evaluated and compared very efficiently, without repetitive model analyses.

Keywords:

Timed Petri nets, cluster tools, chamber revisiting, net invariants, performance analysis.

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