Traffic Flow Speed Prediction in Overhead Transport Systems for Semiconductor Fabrication Using Dense-UNet

To improve semiconductor productivity, efficient operation of the overhead hoist transport (OHT) system, which is an automatic wafer transfer device in a semiconductor fabrication plant (“fab”), is very important. A large amount of data is being generated in real time on the production line through the recent production plan of a smart factory. This data can be used to increase productivity, which in turn enables companies to increase their production efficiency. In this study, for the efficient operation of the OHT, the problem of OHT congestion prediction in the fab is addressed. In particular, the prediction of the OHT transport time was performed by training the deep convolutional neural network (CNN) using the layout image. The data obtained from the simulation of the fab and the actual logistics schedule data of a Korean semiconductor factory were used. The data obtained for each time unit included statistics on volume and speed. In the experiment, a layout image was created and used based on the statistics. The experiment was conducted using only the layout image without any other feature extraction, and it was shown that congestion prediction in the fab is effective.