Troubleshooting in MES of a Semiconductor Factory

This paper presents an approach to troubleshooting in Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) to improve their reliability using passive monitoring. It is a result of cooperation between a semiconductor company and Dresden University of Technology. A network analyzer at fab message bus is used for monitoring, which subscribes transactions and their replies using publish/subscribe paradigm. The goal of evaluation of observation results is a cognitive á posteriori diagnosis. That means detection of redundancies, bottlenecks, error-symptoms, not yet classified situations and retrieval of á posteriori model of the observed normal behavior with intensive user interaction. The diagnosis tool “Extrakt” supports the troubleshooter with numerous analysis and visualization options. The event-based diagnostic rules can be derived automatically or be entered by diagnostician during iterative cognitive diagnosis. They are based on assumptions about production, software and use case scenarios.