Generic visualization of technological process flows

Abstract

The visualization of production flows is a suitable method to understand high process complexities and often multi-operational dependencies. Those processes are typical of modern semiconductor facilities, but are also of interest for complex equipments, such as cluster tools [2]. As a support for production planning and production control, process sequences are usually illustrated by so-called Gantt charts. There are numerous tools available for Gantt chart visualization. However, these tools often do not generically fit to heterogeneous data environments, which are typical of facility sites. This results in the implementation of new visualization software or at least in the very time-consuming code adaptation of already existing solutions. This paper presents a software approach for an easy, flexible and rapid adaptation to nearly every existing database type and its table structure, which is based on a simple online-configuration functionality.