Process and execution planning for manufacturing systems

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's, numerical control machines, etc., without spending much time programming the flexible manufacturing system components. A description of how to automatically generate a high level plan for the task is presented as well as a methodology to automatically calculate the duration of each operation from the machine program. The main contributions include: to link symbolic and execution planning; the referred aims at working for complete manufacturing systems (not for controlling only one robot); different industrial operations (assembly, welding, drilling, etc.) can be considered at the same time.