Representing and generating operation sequences for manufacturing tasks

This paper deals with a system called TPMS (Task Planning for Manufacturing Systems). The main aim of this system is to automatically generate programs or sets of commands for robots, AGV, numerical control machines, etc, without spending much time programming the flexible manufacturing system components. The sequence of operations to be handled by the manufacturing system depends on the constraints for the task. The symbolic plan for the task is represented in the form of a precedence graph. The main contributions are the following ones: to link symbolic and execution planning; the referred aims at working for complete manufacturing systems; different industrial operations can be considered at the same time.