Segmentation of the expected duration of maintenance activities in semiconductor fabs

The duration and execution of preventive maintenance (PM) activities have a significant impact on maintaining effective control over factory equipment while ensuring that it is healthy and available for production. Although most PMs in the industry have similar structures, the task of generating an automated segmented view of the PM duration and flow to highlight inefficiencies and corresponding opportunities for improvement is complicated by a reliance on manual data entries made by human operators. In addition, most optimization and analysis models treat a PM as a single activity while ignoring its parts. In this paper, a model is proposed to generically segment a PM into its parts and define the expected PM duration. The segmentation, done automatically by sequencing the lots run on the tool, results in a clear overview of time losses in the PM and of opportunities for improvement.