A Distributed Supervisor Architecture for a General Wafer Production System

Area of Science:

• Manufacturing Engineering
• Control Systems Engineering
• Discrete Event Systems

Background:

• The wafer production industry faces challenges with expanding production chains, requiring advanced control solutions.
• Current systems struggle to manage increased complexity from more stations, buffers, and robots.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a flexible, distributed control architecture for wafer manufacturing systems.
• To address the challenge of controlling parametric production chains with multiple robots and stations.

Main Methods:

• Developed a modular, parametric discrete event model for wafer manufacturing.
• Designed a distributed supervisory control architecture based on local regular languages.
• Translated system specifications into local languages for robotic manipulators.

Main Results:

• Successfully created a parametric model and distributed control architecture for wafer production.
• Guaranteed system performance, realizability, and non-blocking properties.
• Provided a complexity formula for the distributed architecture.

Conclusions:

• The proposed parametric distributed supervisory control architecture offers a scalable solution for the evolving wafer industry.
• The model and architecture are ready-to-use for expanding wafer production facilities.