Affiliations: Istituto di informatica e Telecomunicazioni,
Università di Catania, V.le A. Doria, 6 – 95100 Catania –
ITALY | CAM Support Group - STMicroelectronics, Str. Primosole
50 – 95100 Catania – ITALY
Abstract: Current manufacturing systems have a very structured production
model, expecially when high complexity and precision is required, as in
semiconductor devices manifacturing. In addition, rapid changes in both
production and market requirements may occur, hence great flexibility is also
essential. These goals, together with the requirement of both adding new
features as well as removing some model limitations, often impose to
re-engineer periodically existing models, reducing as much as possible the
time-to-market of a new product. Re-engineering means first to create an abstract representation of
the system (i.e. the abstract model) through a reverse engineering process,
then this model is re-designed, keeping as much as possible a high abstraction,
so great expandability can be assured, as well as fully exploiting personnel
know-how, so it is possible to take advantage of their experience about the
model. Updating a model generally also requires to improve existing
applications, both re-writing software components as well as adding new
features to existing components. In this paper, the current model used inside STMicroelectronics
facilities to define production flow (the sequence of operations to be
performed in order to make products) is considered. First, the model and its
limitations are described, then introducing an updated, enhanced,
object-oriented model, with aggregational and constitutional hierarchies used
to model and classify all entities and with a flexible inheritance mechanism
used to speed-up and improve the definition of a production flow. It is also considered which improvements are required on the
existing applications, introducing an enhanced environment capable of
supporting the enhanced model while preserving at the same time both technical
and economic investments through avoiding radical changes in existing
environment.
