Interoperating Simulations of Automatic Material Handling Systems and Manufacturing Processes

To perform a high fidelity simulation study on a 300 mm wafer fabrication plant, modeling of the manufacturing process (MP) alone is not sufficient. Inclusion of the automated material handling system (AMHS) model is necessary due to the high degree of factory automation. There isn´t, however, a single tool that is capable of modeling both the AMHS and MP with sufficient accuracy and granularity. A commercial simulation package such as AutoMod is usually used to model the AMHS while AutoSched AP is usually used to model the MP. These packages can be integrated using the supplied interoperation module but flexibility in optimizing the execution performance for different simulation models is lacking. In this paper, we present an approach to interoperation based on the high level architecture standard. We note that the typical characteristics of disparity in the models´ time granularity and frequent model interactions are the obstacle to good execution performance