Colored Petri nets for the performance evaluation of a semiconductor fabrication facility

The design, implementation, and operation of modern manufacturing systems is a complex task. Without powerful modeling and performance evaluation techniques it is practically impossible to efficiently design a manufacturing system. In the paper the application of Petri net modeling and analysis techniques is demonstrated using a real-life industrial example from the semiconductor fabrication field. It is shown how the performance can be evaluated and, using the results, system parameters are adjusted for an efficient production. A hierarchical colored model of the application example is presented. The detailed models of identical failing machines are aggregated to reduce the computational effort of the performance evaluation. Using the industrial example as a case study, the paper aims at presenting some theoretical methods and their application using a software tool during the design of manufacturing systems.