Plan representation and generation for manufacturing tasks

This paper deals with a system named TPMS (Task Planning for Manufacturing Systems). The final goal of this system is to automatically generate programs or sets of commands for robots, AGVs, numerical control machines and other components of the system without the need of spending much time programming the FMS components. In this paper the authors describe how to automatically generate a high level plan for the task. The sequence of operations to be handled by the manufacturing system depends on the constraints for the task. Three types of constraints are defined and explained: processing constraints; feasibility constraints and geometric constraints. The symbolic plan for the task is represented in the form of a precedence graph. The main contributions of TPMS are the following ones: to put together symbolic planning and execution planning; it is being developed to work for complete manufacturing systems (and not for controlling only one robot); different industrial operations can be considered at the same time.