Modeling and analysis for an equipment manager of the manufacturing execution system in semiconductor packaging factories

The equipment manager plays one of the major roles in a manufacturing execution system (MES). It is the communication bridge between the components of MES and the equipment. The soul of an equipment manager is its control algorithm. The purpose of this paper is to develop such a control algorithm. The domain knowledge and requirements are collected from a real semiconductor packaging factory. By using the IDEF0 methodology and the system state diagrams, the functional model and the dynamic model of the control algorithm are built. Then, the control algorithm is translated into the Petri-net model. This allows the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the system. The Petri-net model of the equipment manager is included into the MES Petri-net model. As such, the performance of an equipment manager in the MES environment can be evaluated. These evaluation results are good references for design and decision-making. Finally, the proper control algorithm is converted into the application program of the equipment manager.