VPDSL: A DSL for Software in the Loop Simulations Covering Material Flow

We present an approach to model hardware configurations of complex manufacturing systems such as ASML's lithography machines. These hardware configurations consist of actuator and sensor elements which are controlled by system software that consists of over 35 million lines of code. To minimize the cost of testing and system integration, software simulators of hardware configurations are used -- acting as virtual hardware platforms on which the real control software can be executed and tested. An important aspect in such simulation and testing is material flow (specifically wafer flow) in the machine. To support the effective and efficient realization of simulators covering material flow, we defined a domain specific language (DSL) for modelling the hardware configurations to be simulated, and used a model-driven engineering approach to generate the software components implementing the simulators. The DSL can be used to specify not only nominal (i.e. good weather) behaviour but also simulation based fault injection scenarios. The overall approach reduces the cost of early hardware-software integration and enables simulating scenarios that cannot be executed on real machines because they are difficult or hazardous to carry out.